University of Washington
School of Dentistry

About

The University of Washington School of Dentistry is a leader in providing student education in the areas of Endodontics, Oral Health Sciences, Oral Medicine, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, Oral Pathology, Orthodontics, and Pediatric Dentistry since its founding in 1945. In 2012, the first cohort of students graduated from the innovative RIDE program. RIDE (Regional Initiatives in Dental Education) is a cost-effective, scalable model for increasing the number of dentists trained to meet the needs of rural and underserved populations. The interprofessional program seeks to expand the access and quality of care in remote communities, enhance the diversity of state and regional healthcare workers and improves the health care system as a whole by training team-oriented professionals.

The Challenge

With a strong focus on interprofessional education, the dental programs of the University are tailored to be an immersive and expansive learning experience for their students. To prepare for a new era where dentistry will incorporate advances in genetic research, oral biology and materials science, the school recently overhauled their curriculum to integrate with a large number of regional clinics to further their multidisciplinary approach.

Offering such expansive learning opportunities requires the school to coordinate with multiple clinical sites and preceptors in a variety of locations. The school needs a sophisticated yet easy method to manage the scheduling, information management, and evaluation review process.

The Solution

An emphasis on a multidisciplinary curriculum has led the university to partner with over a dozen different clinical sites to support training for their students. The dental school was looking for an efficient and easy-to-use system to manage student rotations across the region. They turned to AllofE’s clinical suite, part of the eMedley platform, to simplify scheduling, keep track of participating clinical sites and their specialties, and ameliorate the student case log process.

By anchoring all of their student, faculty, preceptor and clinic information in eKeeper, then connecting all the rotation and class schedules into eCLAS and eduSched, the school greatly reduced the complexity of their scheduling process, eliminating confusion and saving administrators valuable time.

Similarly, the eValuate portion of the suite enabled them to do the same thing with their evaluations, streamlining the methods preceptors eValuate their students and students rate their experience. Plus, automatic emails can now be sent to students, preceptors and clinical sites to notify them when it’s time to complete an evaluation or informing them of their rotation schedules.

The Effect

As the University of Washington School of Dentistry looks to the future, their eMedley implementation will help them achieve the goals of providing their students an interprofessional and interdisciplinary education. Now that they are using the Clinical suite, it has led the school to look at different options for approving student case logs and improving their evaluation process. And by smoothing out the complexity of scheduling, school administrators are now free to focus on innovation and analysis of reporting.