The National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education is proud to announce that we are now an approved provider of Joint Accreditation for Interprofessional Continuing Education™. Joint Accreditation establishes the standards for education providers to deliver continuing education planned “by the team for the team.” The Joint Accreditation program was launched in 2009 by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) and the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). This designation allows the National Center to provide medicine, pharmacy and nursing continuing education through a single, unified application, set of accreditation standards, and review process. 

The National Center education leadership team now includes Amy Pittenger, PharmD, PhD, and Doneka Scott, PharmD, MA. Amy and Doneka join the efforts of Barbara Brandt, PhD, Karla Hemesath, PhD, and Susan Wolf, MEd, to further develop and implement education and training programs building upon the research findings and experience of the National Center.

Amy brings experience from a variety of backgrounds, including clinical research, practice in critical care settings and with underserved populations, and academia. She has extensive experience in developing, implementing and evaluating online courses for undergraduate, graduate and health professional students. As a College of Pharmacy faculty member and IPE director, she has been a valued member of the University of Minnesota-wide 1Health IPE implementation team. Her scholarly activity has focused primarily on the scholarship of teaching and learning, specifically innovative educational design and interprofessional education. Amy is collaborating with Barbara Brandt on “New Models of Care Demand New Models of Learning” writing and course design, using her knowledge of cognitive science of learning.  Amy holds numerous honors and awards for education and was recently inducted into the Academic Health Center Academy of Excellence in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

Doneka has been tapped to lead the recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation award, “Integrating interprofessional framework into RWJF program curricula," to the National Center. She will be working with program leaders of the Summer Medical and Dental Education Program and the Harold Amos Medical Faculty Development Program to incorporate knowledge and skill set focused on team-based care and interprofessional collaborative practice.  Along with her experience mentoring, advising and teaching medical and pharmacy students, she has trained health care professionals teams to become specialists in poison information and developed an educational program to prepare them for certification. She is Special Assistant to the Vice Provost and Dean for Undergraduate Education at the University of Minnesota and College of Pharmacy faculty member. In her position as special assistant, she is responsible for implementing a plan to utilize University of Minnesota student predictive learning analytics to improve graduation and retention rates for undergraduate students. Offering valuable insight through her experiences in educational assessment and research, Doneka will lead the National Center efforts in creating communities of practice, increasing diversity in teams and exploring predictive analytics in IPE.

The National Center education team is currently translating early findings from our research into educational programs that will begin in 2016.  Stay tuned for new information about upcoming workshops and seminars.