Clinical Experience in a Medicine-Engineering Interprofessional Education Program: A Qualitative Evaluation

Background Health-Technology-Engineering (HTE) is an interprofessional PhD/MD educational program. All students take the medical school course Introduction to Clinical Medicine (ICM)in order to learn communication, clinical skills, and identify healthcare challenges that could be solved with technologic innovation. This study sought to evaluate HTE-ICM by understanding perceptions between participating disciplines. Methods One author (not part of HTE-ICM) conducted five focus groups; interviews were professionally transcribed. Questions were designed to explore motivation, course satisfaction/challenges, and success measures. Transcripts were reviewed separately by two authors and analyzed using grounded theory. Results 21/63 eligible students (33.3%; 18 MD, 3 PhD) and 9/35 faculty members (26%; 7 HTE, 2 ICM) participated in focus groups. Students were 80.9% male, had an average age of 24.4 years, and 30% self-identified as White/Caucasian. Themes shared by all participants included motivation to collaborate, , satisfaction that the course “opened a window” providing exposure to another profession, and that a success measure is building long-lasting partnerships. Time constraints were the major challenge identified. Additional themes were unique to certain subgroups. Identified opportunities for improvement included (1) peer-mentoring (2) faculty development (3) adjusting student expectations (4) better use of patient encounters to identify problems with engineering solutions. Conclusions Qualitative analysis of HTE-ICM identified benefits and opportunities for improvement that can enhance the local experience and guide development of similar programs.