The “Community Health Mentor Program” (CHMP) reflects the alignment of health professions education where the students learn from their assigned community health mentor who has a chronic disease and/or disability about their experience as a patient within the healthcare system and their community, as well as their role within an interprofessional team. The students meet with their assigned mentor eight times over the course of the one year. This project collectively forms a ‘nexus’ partnership between two state academic institutions, interprofessional student teams, and a defined population of residential community-based consumers of healthcare.

This project is a classroom-based study of a foundational-level IPE curricula which aims to prepare students for advanced training in collaborative clinical practice models. The curriculum teaches team-care skills that have been shown to improve the Triple Aim . It utilizes the Preceptors in the Nexus Toolkit as well as TeamSTEPPS resources. Students participate over four semesters.

The purpose of this project is to determine if an interprofessional team of clinicians and students, working together using a standard teach back method, may improve the quality of the patient’s discharge transition, have a positive effect on Sanford team and student collaboration, improve the patient experience of care, and decrease cost while preventing 30-day readmissions.

In order to meet South Dakota’s need for a unified approach towards Advance Care Planning (ACP), the University of South Dakota’s (USD) Department of Nursing assembled an interprofessional, collaborative network of health professionals to pilot an ACP process. The ultimate goal is to implement a process statewide. The project starts by training learners in USD’s School of Health Science as “First Steps Facilitators,” based on the model pioneered by the Gunderson Respecting Choices® program. Following initial implementation of the training in Sioux Falls, ACP Facilitator training will be integrated into USD’s Health Sciences’ curriculum at USD campuses throughout the state. Trained facilitators will implement the approach to ACP at a number of intervention sites in Vermillion, South Dakota. The community was chosen because it has a hospital, a senior center, and a nursing home that already partner with USD as part of the health sciences curriculum. If the intervention has positive results, it will be scaled up to a state-wide level. A pre-post design will be used to assess the impact of the unified approach to ACP on the state.

This project focuses on developing IPE competencies among nurse practitioners in a one-year residency program and family medicine residents in a three-year residency program. The intervention places the NP residents in weekly interprofessional education sessions with family medicine residents and on interprofessional collaborative care teams at Highland Family Medicine. The NP residents will have both NP and MD faculty preceptors, who will provide feedback on interoprofessional skills development and teamwork.

In order to implement IPE in the clinical practice setting, this intervention incorporates UNE’s Clinical Interprofessional Curriculum (CIPC), which can be found at: http://www.une.edu/clinical-interprofessional-curriculum. CIPC is based on the NCQA patient-centered medical home (PCMH) recognition standards, such as those involving a comprehensive visit and assessment with a complex patient, as well as quality improvement and population health standards. The learning activities also infuse the IPEC competencies and reinforce the use of TeamSTEPPS skills. While helping students to achieve interprofessional competencies, the CIPC is also meant to assist the practice in achieving the PCMH standards. UNE students are also provided robust on-campus IPE during their pre-clinical training years, including: interprofessional seminars; joint curricula between, for instance, dental medicine and osteopathic medicine; interprofessional simulations; and interprofessional service learning.

The Undergraduate Community Practicum engages interprofessional teams of undergraduate health professions students with agency partners in the community to support or implement projects that advance the agency's goals.

The Clinical Practicum engages interprofessional teams of undergraduate health professions students with interprofessional teams in a clinical setting. Multiple settings within hospitals, health care organizations, and community settings are utilized to enable students to gain experience assessing how different interprofessional teams function, and the environmental and personal attributes that contribute to effective teams working together to improve patient care and outcomes.