HUMAN SYSTEMS EXPLORER

(DOCUMENTARY)

Interactive Teaching Diagrams: Clinical Applications

The Human Systems Explorer modules serve, in large part, to help students understand difficult medical concepts and better learn material in a classroom setting. Ultimately, though, the hope is that this technology will help train bright, flexible, intuitive doctors, who are comfortable applying medical principles to patients in a hospital setting. This is another frontier for these interactive diagrams, which are starting to be used inside the hospitals, as students and residents transition from the study of pathophysiology to actual patient care.

Dr. Richard Schwartstein, who has collaborated on the creation of interactive diagrams, stresses that this leap from student to doctor isn't just about memorizing concepts; it's also about having a fluid sense for the material, so that each new patient situation can be analyzed with a fresh eye. Much of medicine, he says, is based around pattern recognition – that is, once you see multiple cases of one disease, you recognize it the next time and know how to treat it. But it's just as important to recognize when a pattern is slightly off, when the traditional formula doesn't work and a patient requires a different kind of treatment. This means a doctor must step back, ask questions, and perhaps even return to basic medical principles for understanding.

And this is where Human Systems Explorer modules can once again serve as vital tools. When a professor reviews a medical concept on the floor of the hospital, residents might not get it by simply listening or being told to go back to a reading in a physiology textbook, says Dr. Schwartzstein. But by referencing an interactive diagram, a professor gives them a visual cue for the concept. And by encouraging residents to go back to the diagrams during downtime in their shifts, he says, it provides a new on-site resource for doctors-in-training. Also, because the Explorer modules are web-based, students and residents alike can access them on the hospital floor at any time-whether it's 12pm during a training session or at 3am in the Intensive Care Unit.

Dr. Barbara Cockrill, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, says that students use interactive diagrams when they're first learning concepts at the very beginning of medical school, "which is the hardest time." But those same concepts can look very different after visiting a bedside and seeing a sick patient. That's when it's helpful to revisit the modules and dig deeper into the material and how it might be applied: "We all need to learn it 10 times over before we really understand it," she says "so being able to go back to it is important."