A team of faculty members from the Campbell University College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences have earned the prestigious 2023 ACCP Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Paper of the Year Award.
The paper appeared in the American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education, the pinnacle for publication as pharmacy educators, said Dr. Riley Bowers, associate professor of Pharmacy Practice and lead author of the paper.
Called “Comparison of Student Pharmacists’ Knowledge Retention Utilizing Electronic Health Records Versus Simultaneously Completing Simulated Experiences,” the study is the product of the first internal research grant from the College of Pharmacy & Health Sciences and the Campbell School of Osteopathic Medicine.
The American College of Clinical Pharmacy honored the Campbell writers in November during an Education and Training PRN Business Meeting, part of the group’s annual meeting in Dallas. The national organization is composed not only of pharmacy faculty from across the country but also clinical pharmacists, who also can submit research papers for awards and honors.
“It was pretty surprising,” Bowers said. “It’s a great honor. The award was in my name because I was the primary author, but there was no way to pull off a project of this magnitude without an awesome team. You don’t pull off a four-year project that involved over 200 students without a lot of help.”
The writing team included Pharmacy Practice faculty Drs. Scott Perkins, co-director of Drug Information; Beth Mills, chair of Pharmacy Practice; Katie Trotta, Clinical associate professor; and Emily Ghassemi, Clinical assistant professor.
The project began in 2018, amid a curricular transition and as students were learning new electronic health record software. Faculty members, in turn, were thinking of new ways to have students apply information toward improving retention and exam scores. Students from the university’s Physician Assistant program joined the effort.
The primary objective was to compare knowledge retention of the case material between groups at one month, according to the abstract. Each year, an element of simulated experience was added onto the previous year’s case.
The first year, students completed the case using only the electronic health record web application. The second year, students combined the experience from the previous year with an objective structured clinical examination, which included standardized patients. Students from the PA program joined the study in 2021, and case scores and student perceptions were compared between groups.
Of 260 potential participants, 238 students were included in the primary analysis, the abstract says.
“What we found is, with every iteration, the students actually had more knowledge retention,” Bowers said. “Basically, the more active the learning and the more interprofessional that the activity became, the better the students retain that information.”
Adding standardized patients and interprofessional team-based care to a pharmacy skills laboratory using a simulated electronic health record significantly improved student knowledge retention and perceptions, the abstract says.
“Results showed that with the addition of interprofessional team-based care and standardized patients, significant improvement was demonstrated in knowledge retention assessments at one month,” says the abstract. “Mean knowledge retention assessment scores for the 2018, 2019, and 2021 groups were 63.8%, 71.7%, and 76.1%, respectively. Significant improvement was also found in student perceptions.”
Said Bowers, “I think educational research, especially in Pharmacy, is something that we’re that were uniquely suited to at Campbell, since we’re teaching university rather than a research university. We get a lot of support on that end, and it’s definitely brought more of our faculty into the fold of doing educational research.”