Medical Centers Adopt Qstream® Mobile Platform to Keep Current on Healthcare Practices

 

Qstream, provider of an acclaimed mobile platform widely used for professional healthcare education, has announced that several major medical centers and healthcare leaders have purchased Qstream’s solution for use in the ongoing education of physicians and clinicians on a range of topics, including patient safety, infection control, emergency medicine, palliative care, and advanced life support.

New clients include:

 

• Boston Children’s Hospital, which purchased Qstream to create mobile learning courses for residents in its pediatric emergency medicine rotation starting this fall;
• Partners HealthCare, which purchased Qstream to deliver quality and safety training to residents and fellows using curriculum designed to reflect institutional priorities, initiatives and specialty specific concerns;
• The Mayo Clinic, which purchased Qstream to deliver education on palliative care;
• Baylor College of Medicine, which purchased Qstream for a new primary care curriculum for pediatric residents;
• The University of California Health Quality Improvement Network, which is using Qstream to develop a quality improvement and patient safety curriculum for implementation across the five hospitals of the UC Health System;
• The National Association for Continuing Education (NACE), which offers Qstream-powered courses for medical professionals.

 

Developed at Harvard Medical School, Qstream facilitates continuous learning by delivering simple, scenario-based “challenges” to any mobile device over spaced intervals. In just 3 to 5 minutes a day, clinicians progress through mandatory training without having to carry a laptop or walk to a desktop station. Built-in game mechanics, including scoring and leaderboards, drive strong user engagement, and onboard analytics simplify the process of reporting program effectiveness to ensure outcomes are met.

 

At Baylor College of Medicine, pediatric residents are sent a few questions every two days covering a range of primary care issues. Questions and explanations are developed primarily by the Academic General Pediatrics faculty under the supervision of Dr. D’Juanna White-Satcher. Each question must be answered correctly at least twice before it is retired from the queue. Residents access the questions using their smart phones and tablets via a native Qstream app or email, allowing them to learn on the move.

 

“Despite the high quality of healthcare education being delivered today, traditional formats are not always conducive to the way that people actually store information critical to job performance,” said Dr. B. Price Kerfoot, Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and Qstream co-founder. “Qstream’s approach embraces a ‘spaced delivery’ methodology clinically proven to increase retention and durably change on-the-job behaviors.”

 

In a randomized trial involving 1,067 students at four medical schools, Dr. Kerfoot and his Harvard colleagues demonstrated that interval reinforcement increased long-term retention by up to 170 percent. In another study involving 95 primary care clinicians across the northeastern U.S., Dr. Kerfoot’s research showed the use of the ‘spacing’ and ‘testing’ effects of Qstream contributed to a 40 percent decrease in the number of unnecessary cancer screenings.