Investigating Technology Training in Healthcare Education

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Technology in healthcare has developed rapidly over the past few decades. Medical education has needed to adapt to prepare healthcare practitioners to use new and constantly evolving technologies.

This summer, a research team sponsored by the Cook Center is focusing on how healthcare technology training is being integrated into the curricula in US nursing programs. The six-person team is led by Professor Keisha Bentley-Edwards (Duke School of Medicine), and includes postdoctoral, graduate and undergraduate fellows.

Fatima Fairfax is a graduate fellow spearheading this project. She recently shared her thoughts about the importance of this research and the mentorship that's an essential component of the Cook Center Summer Fellowship program.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How are you approaching the development of surveys for this project?

The team will develop and refine questions as we do preliminary research for the project. To start, I am interested in understanding how providers are being taught and trained around technologies related to care management and delivery, like Electronic Health Records, diagnostic software, AI in clinical settings and personal health devices. I'm interested in how ubiquitous and uniform this information may be, and what kinds of ethics and equity training may be happening concurrently. 

Why the focus on nursing curricula?

Nursing is an understudied population in medical sociology, at least in my sphere of research.

Nurses interface with as many patients as doctors and often for longer periods of time. They do a lot of intake and data entry, so understanding how training occurs for both physicians and nurses is important in understanding the integration of these technologies into healthcare.

What interests you most about this research?

I'm interested in all of the human aspects that have to do with the implementation and use of healthcare technology. 

Who is creating and programming these technologies, who is using them and how, and who is receiving care? Understanding how providers, who are central to the integration of these technologies into the healthcare system, are being taught around these technologies is an important piece of the puzzle. 

Ultimately, I think having this information may help illuminate where healthcare is heading for the next generation of providers, as well as giving us a better understanding of what ethics and safeguards are being taught alongside training in the use of these technologies.

What do you hope the undergraduate fellows will learn through this work?

I'm really looking forward to working with this team of undergraduates. I want this project to be extremely collaborative and hope they feel able to really lean into their particular areas of interest and expertise. Each student brings a slightly different lens to the work, which I think will generate a very interesting set of questions and analyses. I hope to be able to provide the frame for them to thrive and that they'll get tangible experience and research products on a topic that means something to them.

Why were you motivated to participate as a summer research fellow?

I am grateful to the Cook Center for facilitating this research opportunity. This is a project I've been thinking about for a while, and when I approached Professor Lee and Professor Brown with my idea, they immediately saw the opportunity for collaboration through the Cook Center. 

Being able to realize this research project, and get experience in mentorship and research team management, will be a great experience for me.