A starter's guide to learning and teaching how to coproduce healthcare services.

BACKGROUND: There has been insufficient attention paid to the role of learning in co-production-both how service users and professional service providers learn to co-produce effectively and how the lessons of co-production are captured at a service level. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop and test a curriculum to support healthcare professionals' interest in learning how to co-produce health and healthcare services with patients. METHODS: We developed a co-production curriculum that was tested iteratively in multiple in-person and virtual teaching sessions and short courses. We conducted a formative evaluation of the co-production curriculum and teaching tools to tailor the curriculum. RESULTS: Several theories underpin our approach to learning and teaching how to co-produce healthcare services. The co-production curriculum is grounded in systems theory and shares elements of educational theories, namely, the postmodern curriculum matrix, the actor network theory and situated learning in communities of practice. Learning participants valued the sense of community, the experiential learning environment, and the practical methods to support their exploration of co-production. CONCLUSION: This paper summarizes the educational theories that underpin our efforts to develop and implement the curriculum, reports on a formative assessment conducted with learners, and makes recommendations for creating an environment for learning how health professionals can co-produce health and healthcare with patients.

A Change Management Case Study for Safe Opioid Prescribing and Opioid Use Disorder Treatment.

BACKGROUND: Given that prescribing practices have contributed to the current opioid epidemic and that primary care clinicians are the largest prescribers of opioids, family physicians must consider the twin goals of safely prescribing opioids for patients with chronic pain while effectively identifying and treating those who have developed opioid use disorder (OUD). However, family physicians may feel constrained by a culture and systems in their offices that do not support achieving these twin goals. METHODS: In a family medicine clinic within a larger academic institution that cares for an underserved, multicultural patient population in the greater Boston area, we provide a case study that illustrates the twin goals of safe opioid prescribing and treating OUD. We used 2 models of change management-Lewin's Three-Step Change Theory and the McKinsey 7S Model of Change-as a framework to describe our 5-year process of using cultural and structural elements to support these efforts. RESULTS: Deliberate use of change management theory to support both safe opioid prescribing and treating patients with OUD over the past 5 years resulted in changes to the practices, people, skills, and infrastructure within our clinic. These changes have demonstrated a sense of stability and sustainability and hence now represent our clinic's current culture. CONCLUSION: The Lewin and 7S models of change can be helpful guides to creating and maintaining a foundation of office-wide culture and structural support to meet the twin goals of safe opioid prescribing and treating patients with OUD.

A Systematic Network of Autism Primary Care Services (SYNAPSE): A Model of Coproduction for the Management of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is growing rapidly, affecting 1 in 59 children in the United States in 2018. Individuals with ASD currently receive fragmented care that threatens their health and well-being. Challenges of autism care include disconnections between the medical system and school supports, poor care coordination between primary care and specialists, and saturation of neuropsychiatry-based centers' capacity to care for the ASD population. ASD treatment also lacks of a coordinated system of care for patients' multi-system comorbidities. Families are calling for an ASD care delivery system to meet their needs and the needs of their children. To serve people with ASD and their medical and other providers, we propose a coordinated approach to care grounded in primary care. We call the model the "Systematic Network of Autism Primary Care Services (SYNAPSE)." We develop the model by applying the frameworks of "coproduction" of care and chronic disease management. In this Commentary we discuss the model's rationale, underpinnings, and the implications for clinical practice. We advance these ideas to align with policy makers' recognition of the importance of primary care for ASD, as reflected by the most recent Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC) meeting at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Incorporating patient input into the design of a disease management program for COPD.

In the era of value-based payment contracts, there is increasing emphasis on disease management as a strategy for improving care quality and reducing costs. To design effective disease management programs, healthcare systems should understand the day-to-day experience of living with particular health conditions, and ensure that evidence-based services and interventions are adapted to align with the realities of patients' lives and their priorities. For healthcare systems operating with limited resources, there is a need for practical and small-scale approaches for collecting and using patient input as part of program design and operations. This case study describes a targeted interview process that Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA) used to gather patient input during the design of a disease management program for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The patient perspectives gathered through the interviews influenced several aspects of the program design. The key lessons from CHA's experience are: 1) A small-scale approach with cycles of 5-10 interviews can produce valuable insights for program design; 2) Short patient vignettes can be used to summarize patient data in a simple and compelling format; and 3) Clinicians' perspectives are critical for interpreting patient input and extracting information that is most likely to be useful for program design. CHA's approach provides an example of a systematic and practical process for gathering patient input that other healthcare systems can adapt to their local contexts.

Using a Social Worker Transition Coach to Improve Hospital-to-Home Transitions for High-Risk Nonelderly Patients.

High-risk hospitalized younger adults (age ≤60) have 30-day readmission rates comparable to Medicare fee-for-service patients. This younger cohort has a high incidence of comorbid mental health and substance use disorders, which increases the complexity of their postdischarge care. Although few care transition studies have enrolled younger adult patients, findings from our previous work suggest that these patients have postdischarge needs requiring different approaches than those serving elderly patients. Our current pilot study, situated in a safety-net system, targets this younger population, employing a social worker as the Transition Coach (TC). Social workers are explicitly trained to address psychosocial complexities, and we evaluated whether our TC intervention could improve hospital-to-home transitions by assisting patients with medication management, attending follow-up appointments, and addressing medical, psychiatric, and psychosocial needs. Primary outcomes were Patient Activation Measure scores on admission and 30-days postdischarge; outpatient follow-up at 7 and 30 days; and all-cause, in-network 30-, 60-, and 90-day readmissions. At 30 and 60 days, no differences were observed in the primary outcomes; at 90 days, intervention patients demonstrated a trend toward readmission reduction. A social worker-led transitional care program shows promise in reducing readmissions over 90 days among high-risk, lower socioeconomic, nonelderly adult patients.

Coproducing Health Professions Education: A Prerequisite to Coproducing Health Care Services?

In 2016, Batalden et al proposed a coproduction model for health care services. Starting from the argument that health care services should demonstrate service-dominant rather than goods-dominant logic, they argued that health care outcomes are the result of the intricate interaction of the provider and patient in concert with the system, community, and, ultimately, society. The key notion is that the patient is as much an expert in determining outcomes as the provider, but with different expertise. Patients come to the table with expertise in their lived experiences and the context of their lives.The authors posit that education, like health care services, should follow a service-dominant logic. Like the relationship between patients and providers, the relationship between learner and teacher requires the integrated expertise of each nested in the context of their system, community, and society to optimize outcomes. The authors then argue that health professions learners cannot be educated in a traditional, paternalistic model of education and then expected to practice in a manner that prioritizes coproductive partnerships with colleagues, patients, and families. They stress the necessity of adapting the health care services coproduction model to health professions education. Instead of asking whether the coproduction model is possible in the current system, they argue that the current system is not sustainable and not producing the desired kind of clinicians.A current example from a longitudinal integrated clerkship highlights some possibilities with coproduced education. Finally, the authors offer some practical ways to begin changing from the traditional model. They thus provide a conceptual framework and ideas for practical implementation to move the educational model closer to the coproduction health care services model that many strive for and, through that alignment, to set the stage for improved health outcomes for all.

CEO-CLER Innovation Grants Program: Empowering Residents as Clinical Learning Environment Change Agents.

BACKGROUND: Many efforts over the past decade have focused on developing quality improvement and safety curricula for residents. Sponsoring institutions have encountered challenges aligning resident projects with institutional quality and safety priorities, engaging faculty mentors, and securing support for resident initiatives from executive leadership. OBJECTIVE: We developed a small grants program to support resident-led change projects intended to improve the clinical learning environment. We assessed program acceptability to residents and faculty, impact of program structure in supporting successful change projects, and program feasibility and financial sustainability. METHODS: Program acceptability was assessed through a review of resident participation. Three aspects of resident change project success were considered: (1) accomplishment of stated aims; (2) institutional change beyond the end of grant funding; and (3) academic publication or presentation. The impact of program structure on project success was assessed through a review of submitted end-of-year narrative reports. RESULTS: The Award Selection Committee has given 41 awards to 44 residents over 4 years, engaging 21% (44 of 213) of residents. Seventy-one percent of projects (29 of 41) produced changes that continued beyond the grant year, and 46% (19 of 41) produced an academic publication or presentation. At the end of the grant period that funded the program's initial 3 years, the chief executive officer elected to continue program funding. CONCLUSIONS: A small grants program supporting resident-led change projects intended to improve the clinical learning environment is acceptable to residents and faculty, feasible to administer, and sustainable with support from institutional senior leaders.

Coproduction of healthcare service.

Efforts to ensure effective participation of patients in healthcare are called by many names-patient centredness, patient engagement, patient experience. Improvement initiatives in this domain often resemble the efforts of manufacturers to engage consumers in designing and marketing products. Services, however, are fundamentally different than products; unlike goods, services are always 'coproduced'. Failure to recognise this unique character of a service and its implications may limit our success in partnering with patients to improve health care. We trace a partial history of the coproduction concept, present a model of healthcare service coproduction and explore its application as a design principle in three healthcare service delivery innovations. We use the principle to examine the roles, relationships and aims of this interdependent work. We explore the principle's implications and challenges for health professional development, for service delivery system design and for understanding and measuring benefit in healthcare services.

The health of safety net hospitals following Massachusetts health care reform: changes in volume, revenue, costs, and operating margins from 2006 to 2009.

Massachusetts health care reform, designed to expand coverage and access to care for vulnerable populations, serves as the model for national health reform in the United States that will be implemented in 2014. Yet, little is known about how the reform may have affected the demand for and the financial performance of safety net hospitals (SNH), the primary source of care for such populations before the reform. Using a quasi-experimental design that included all acute care hospitals in the state, we calculated changes in mean inpatient and outpatient volumes, revenue, and operating margins at SNH from the pre-reform (Fiscal Year 2006) to the post-reform (Fiscal Year 2009) period. We contrasted these changes with contemporaneous changes occurring among non-safety net hospitals (NSNH) using a difference-in-differences approach. We found that SNH in Massachusetts continue to play a disproportionately large role in caring for disadvantaged patients after reform, but that their financial performance has declined considerably compared with NSNH. Ongoing reform efforts in the United States should account for continued SNH demand among the most vulnerable patients and should be designed so as not to undermine the financial stability of SNH that meet this demand.

Beyond a curricular design of convenience: replacing the noon conference with an academic half day in three internal medicine residency programs.

Several residency programs have created an academic half day (AHD) for the delivery of core curriculum, and some program Web sites provide narrative descriptions of individual AHD curricula; nonetheless, little published literature on the AHD format exists. This article details three distinctive internal medicine residency programs (Cambridge Health Alliance, University of Cincinnati, and New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical College) whose leaders replaced the traditional noon conference curriculum with an AHD. Although each program's AHD developed independently of the other two, retrospective comparative review reveals instructive similarities and differences that may be useful to other residency directors. In this article, the authors describe the distinct approaches to the AHD at the three institutions through a framework of six core principles: (1) protect time and space to facilitate learning, (2) nurture active learning in residents, (3) choose and sequence curricular content deliberately, (4) develop faculty, (5) encourage resident preparation and accountability for learning, and (6) employ a continuous improvement approach to curriculum development and evaluation. The authors chronicle curricular adaptations at each institution over the first three years of experience. Preliminary outcome data, presented in the article, suggests that the transition from the traditional noon conference to an AHD may increase conference attendance, improve resident and faculty satisfaction with the curriculum, and improve resident performance on the In Training Examination.

Commentary: two kinds of intelligence.

This commentary is a celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Academic Medicine feature Teaching and Learning Moments. The authors reflect that the moments highlighted in these columns are everyday moments in every medical school, in every residency program, in every clinic, in every hospital. These moments become extraordinary and personally transformative only when we pay attention. The invitation to honor these moments and value our subjective experiences is an invitation to integrity, to unite "soul" and "role." Yet the power of these narratives is not truly unleashed until they are discussed in community. In conversation, these personal narratives or "stories of self" have the potential to find common cause with the stories of others and become "stories of us." Through conversation that is rooted in a particular time and place, these stories of self and stories of us are linked to a "story of now." And these public narratives have the power to catalyze movements for change.

The hidden curriculum: what can we learn from third-year medical student narrative reflections?

PURPOSE: To probe medical students' narrative essays as a rich source of data on the hidden curriculum, a powerful influence shaping the values, roles, and identity of medical trainees. METHOD: In 2008, the authors used grounded theory to conduct a thematic analysis of third-year Harvard Medical School students' reflection papers on the hidden curriculum. RESULTS: Four overarching concepts were apparent in almost all of the papers: medicine as culture (with distinct subcultures, rules, vocabulary, and customs); the importance of haphazard interactions to learning; role modeling; and the tension between real medicine and prior idealized notions. The authors identified nine discrete "core themes" and coded each paper with up to four core themes based on predominant content. Of the 30 students (91% of essay writers, 20% of class) who consented to the study, 50% focused on power-hierarchy issues in training and patient care; 30% described patient dehumanization; 27%, respectively, detailed some "hidden assessment" of their performance, discussed the suppression of normal emotional responses, mentioned struggling with the limits of medicine, and recognized personal emerging accountability in their medical training; 23% wrote about the elusive search for personal/professional balance and contemplated the sense of "faking it" as a young doctor; and 20% relayed experiences derived from the positive power of human connection. CONCLUSIONS: Students' reflections on the hidden curriculum are a rich resource for gaining a deeper understanding of how the hidden curriculum shapes medical trainees. Ultimately, medical educators may use these results to inform, revise, and humanize clinical medical education.

Evidence for a possibly X-linked trait related to affective illness.

OBJECTIVE: The present report attempts to replicate on the probands' brothers, a previously reported (1992) negative relationship between maternal grandfather longevity (MGFL) and affective illness in grandsons. Hitherto this finding had not been replicated. To provide further evidence that the association may be recessive and X-linked, we also examined the association between MGFL and affective illness in the probands' mothers. Finally, in order to examine why MGFL might be a predictor of affective illness, the report examines the association of the probands' affective illness and their own mortality. METHOD: A 60-year prospective study of men selected in 1940 and followed until the present day provided good information on depressive illness in relatives and longevity of ancestors. To overcome the uncertainty of depressive diagnoses, we assessed affective illness in the probands categorically, dimensionally, operationally and with the Lazare Personality Inventory. RESULTS: Presence of affective illness in brothers was negatively associated with MGFL (p = 0.003) but maternal affective illness was independent of MGFL. Test items suggesting emotional lability in the probands were significantly and negatively associated with MGFL. Consistent with the association of increased MGFL with low affective distress in the probands, the 70 probands showing the least evidence of affective distress before age 50 had twofold (p < 0.001) lower mortality at 80 than the rest of the sample. The 31 probands manifesting the greatest affective distress manifested twofold higher mortality before age 65 (p < 0.001) than the rest of the sample. CONCLUSION: The strong negative association of proband affective distress -- and equally important -- the positive association of proband mental health with MGFL and the lack of association of maternal longevity and depression with MGFL points to the possibility of a recessive X-gene or genes playing a role in depressive illness.