Middle Tennessee State University
Physician Assistant Program

About

“The mission of the MTSU Physician Assistant Studies Program is to provide comprehensive innovative medical education of the highest quality to prepare a diverse community of Physician Assistants to thrive as compassionate and collaborative members of the healthcare team with a commitment to community service and increasing access to care.

The MTSU Physician Assistant Studies Program will be a leading educational program with national recognition for excellence in service-learning, quality and compassionate healthcare, and increasing access to care to diverse populations.” (https://www.mtsu.edu/program/physician-assistant-studies-studies-m-s/)

The Challenge

In 2021, as a developing physician assistant program, MTSU needed a comprehensive education tracking system for their inaugural class of students. They were looking for a system to manage their curriculum mapping, testing and assessment, documentation tracking, clinical scheduling, clinical experience tracking, and evaluations.

The Solution: Implementing eMedley

The MTSU Physician Assistant Program implemented the eMedley platform to track students in both their didactic and clinical phases.

Curriculum Mapping

• Preloaded ARC-Standards, NCCPA Competencies, PANCE Blueprint and Topics, PAEA Core Competencies
• Inherited mapping from Program Objectives to Course Objectives to Session Objectives
• Gap Analysis to find what is missing across the curriculum
• Overlap Analysis to track redundancy and the amount of coverage of competencies and topics
• View only curriculum website to share with faculty or in an accreditation review

Documentation Management

• Clinical site and affiliation agreement management
• Preceptor documentation, specialty, certification, and license tracking
• Student documentation tracking
• Automated documentation expiration notifications

Clinical Scheduling

• Intuitive Schedule Planner for building and publishing the perfect schedule
• Capacity and availability management and tracking
• Quick access to student, site, and preceptor information while planning through eKeeper integration

Assessment and Testing

• Preloaded ARC-Standards, NCCPA Competencies, PANCE Blueprint and Topics for Question Mapping
• Direct integration with eCurriculum for mapping to Objectives
• Multi-level question banks and access levels to organize and share questions
• Secure lockdown browser that supports both online and offline testing
• Automated and secure question review session management
• Comprehensive dashboard to visualize performance at the cohort, course, test, and student levels

Evaluations

• Clinical evaluations of the student, clinical site, and preceptor
• Intuitive Evaluation Form builder to create multiple choice, multiple response, text, and grading rubric questions
• Advanced rubric builder for assessing level of mastery for grading criteria
• Evaluation scheduling tool to automatically send evaluations based on selected criteria and clinical schedule

Experience Tracking

• Case Logging to track individual experiences based on patient demographics, visit types, diagnosis, procedures, and competencies observed, assisted, or performed
• Integrated time logging for monitoring the amount and quality of experience
• Approval workflow for case log and time log review
• Comprehensive experience dashboard to analyze data by student, cohort, clinical site, rotation, and preceptor

The Effect

The MTSU Physician Assistant Program has a comprehensive solution in place to track the competencies, outcomes, and objectives that students are being taught and how well they are performing on tests and in the field related to those competencies.  The fully integrated system provides comprehensive reporting to facilitate curriculum analysis, performance reviews, and improvement programs.