Nova Southeastern University
Physician Assistant Program
MANAGEMENT ACROSS CAMPUSES
About
Nova Southeastern University has science programs in almost every field imaginable and numerous campuses scattered across the state of Florida. The ARC-PA accredits the four Physician Assistant Programs in Orlando, Jacksonville and Southwest Florida (Fort Myers) at NSU separately, and the programs needed not only a way to compare campuses, but also the ability to show and use data related to curriculum mapping and clinical tracking efficiently and comprehensively.
The Challenge
In early 2013, when AllofE Solutions started talking with the Physician Assistant program on the Fort Lauderdale campus about eCurriculum, a curriculum-mapping and management system, the administrators jumped. The four program directors had never been able to formalize a method for tying their objectives to the ARC-PA Standards and NCCPA Blueprint Tasks, Competencies, and Medical Topics and to find gaps and redundancies with the standards easily. In addition, the programs really needed a way to show the site visitors the types of experiences students were getting in their clinical rotations. They were recording the data, but they lacked the ability to show it in a way that made sense for their site visits, or even for their own analysis. Bill Marquardt, the Associate Dean for Physician Assistant Education, said, “We got dinged over the past few site visits due to not having the data available. ” That’s where eCLAS came in, with its interactive dashboards, core reports and ad-hoc reporting functionality. Marquardt said, “[AllofE] got it from day one. We’d say, ‘Isn’t there a way to look at X?’ and [AllofE] would say, ‘Hey great. Let’s do that.’”
The Solution
AllofE made the transition as easy as possible for the programs by pre-loading everything: eCurriculum was tailored to fit (and then loaded with) Nova’s desired standards, courses and objectives, and each program’s rotation types, clinical benchmarks, clinical sites, preceptors, and the ICD-9 and CPT codes were built into eCLAS. As time went on, the clinical directors at each campus formulated additional ideas on how to better utilize eCLAS, such as providing the students with pictures of preceptors before their first rotation at the site. As Nova’s needs have grown, AllofE has been able to cater functionality to each program / campus as required.
The Effect
Within 5 months of the students starting rotations, they had submitted more than 155,000 case logs, and the programs have been able to keep track of evaluations and performance over time in a whole new way. eCurriculum has helped the programs identify gaps and redundancies in how their standards are tied to their curriculum, allowing them to better prepare for their site visits– a couple of which are coming up over the next year.
Moving Forward
Between the programs’ clear vision; the user friendliness for students, preceptors, and administrators; and the comprehensive reporting, AllofE’s projects with Nova have been highly successful. But we’re not done. As the programs define more and more of their needs, AllofE continues to cater Nova’s implementations to each program’s requirements. This dedication to the projects on both ends has not gone unnoticed. Since the Nova Physician Assistant programs’ projects began, the Physical Therapy Program has implemented eCurriculum, and the new Advanced Practice Nurse Practitioner Program has implemented its own version of eCLAS, Nova’s progressive outlook on education across the board and AllofE’s dedication to providing the most pioneering systems available has proven to be the perfect combination. Some might say that this level of success begs the question: could this be a glimpse into the future for all health science programs?
“AllofE got it from day one. We’d say, ‘Isn’t there a way to look at X?’ and AllofE would say, ‘Hey great. Let’s do that.’”
– Bill Marquardt, Associate Dean for Physician Assistant Education