Work Description

Date: 24 March, 2024

Dataset Title: Doctors of Tomorrow: Evaluating the effectiveness and impact of a virtual medical pipeline program during the COVID-19 pandemic

Dataset Creators: S. Irani, S. Tolia, J. Finks, G. Sandhu

Dataset Contact: Sanaya Irani; sanaya@med.umich.edu

Funding: NA

Research Description:
Program Description - DoT was founded in 2012 with a mission to increase diversity amongst medical professionals by preparing students from underrepresented communities in Detroit to successfully pursue careers in healthcare. Our program builds on a partnership between Cass Technical High School (CTHS) and the University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS). The CTHS student body is reflective of the Detroit population with more than 80% of students identifying with racial and ethnic minority backgrounds. Students with an interest in healthcare apply for the program as ninth graders. In recent years, the program has received over 60 applications for approximately 30 positions in each grade. DoT’s unique strength lies in its longitudinal structure. There are three branches of the program – Foundations (ninth and tenth grade), Rising (eleventh and twelfth grade) and Succeed (undergraduate). Ninth graders start out in DoT Foundations. Each student is paired with a first-year medical student mentor at UMMS for the entire academic year. DoT students travel to UMMS every month for a visit day, with activities designed to give students hands-on experiences in healthcare, such as suturing and ultrasound skills in the simulation center, and clinical shadowing. Students then meet with their medical student mentor over lunch. The latter part of the day is dedicated to working on their capstone projects. For the capstone projects, students work in small teams led by medical student leaders to identify a community health issue, partner with a local organization, and present their proposed solutions at a formal symposium at the end of the year.

Transition to Virtual Programming - In light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of universities cancelled all campus events including those of pipeline programs. We felt that our programming offered an important service to our students that would be greatly missed, so our team worked to quickly create and implement a virtual program. We ensured that each of our students had access to technology at home and those who did not were offered scholarships. During our introductory student session and new parent meeting, our leadership team discussed how to set up a Gmail email address for weekly communications and taught the students how to use Zoom, Google Drive, Google Docs and Google Sheets for online learning collaboration. For the virtual Foundations program, we offered 1-hour seminars each month, where a physician was invited to give a 30-minute presentation about different organ systems, followed by a 30-minute case-based session where students worked with medical student mentors to apply their new knowledge. We also created novel sessions such as “The Path to College and Medical School” and collaborated with members of the Black Medical Association (BMA) and Latin American and Native American Medical Association (LANAMA) to host a panel session where students could learn from medical students who identified as URiM. For the mentorship aspect, we created “pods” of Foundations, Rising, and Succeed students along with medical student and physician mentors. The Foundations students and mentors met every month for an hour on Zoom, a virtual communication platform, to work on their Capstone project. Rising and Succeed students joined the group for three full-pod meetings. The goal was to increase near-peer mentorship and connections between DoT students at all levels.

Study Population - Due to the virtual nature of the 2020-2021 program, we accepted 100% of 9th grade applicants from CTHS. We also expanded our reach to a new school, The School at Marygrove (TSM), which is also located in Detroit, Michigan. TSM is involved in the Detroit-20 Partnership with the University of Michigan College of Education and includes a novel three-year residency program for novice teachers. During the 2020-2021 school year, 108 students participated in the Foundations programming with 72 of them being 9th graders and 36 being 10th graders. The students were mostly from CTHS with 12 students out of the 108 total being from TSM. Students were predominantly from an African American/Black racial background (68.4% from N=98 respondents). The students were representative of their respective schools. The majority of students at CTHS identify as black, come from low-income homes, and have variable levels of parental education.

Methodology:
Study Design - Our project received IRB exempt status [HUM00203992] from the University of Michigan Institutional Review Board. Surveys were created to assess the impact of our virtual curriculum using a multiple methods study design. Pre- and post-surveys were created with specific learning objectives for five of the large group physician and panelist lectures. The learning objectives were identified by the DoT program Director of Operations (SI), who reviewed the lecture slides provided by each presenter. The objectives were verified by the DoT program Director of Foundations (NG), as well as the two program advisors (JF, GS). Students were asked to rate familiarity and understanding on five-point Likert scales. All Likert scales were rated on a scale of 1 to 5 from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. Students were also asked free response questions about their learning from the sessions, their favorite part about the sessions, and suggestions for future iterations. In addition, larger surveys were distributed by email to all participants in January (program mid-year point) and May (end-of-year). On 5-point Likert scales, students were asked to rate their familiarity with the fields of medicine and the path to becoming a physician. They were also asked to rate the impact of large group sessions and pod mentoring sessions on their knowledge. They were asked to rate familiarity at the beginning of the year in September (time point A) and mid-way through the year (time point B) on a survey sent in January and then asked to rate these aspects at the end-of-year (time point C) on a survey sent in May. They were only asked to rate impact for time points B and C. Pre-surveys were distributed via email to all Foundations students one week prior to the lectures. Email reminders to complete the pre-surveys were typically sent at least once prior to the lecture itself. Post-surveys were sent out one hour after the conclusion of the lecture with one follow-up reminder email later in the week. The program mid-year and end-of-year surveys were sent mid-way through January and May respectively and reminder emails were sent in the two weeks after survey release.

Quantitative Analysis - All survey data was matched by participant name to accurately compare pre/post-survey data as well as the mid-year and end-of-year data points for each student. The data was then anonymized prior to quantitative analysis. Pre- and post-test data were analyzed using two-tailed paired sample t-tests with an alpha level of 0.05. Familiarity scores and impact scores were analyzed using two-tailed paired sample t-tests. Familiarity was compared at time points A and C and B and C. Impact was compared at time points B and C. T-tests were run on Microsoft Excel (Microsoft, Redmond, WA) using the Data Analysis Statistical Software tool.

Qualitative Analysis - All free-text responses from the various surveys were coded using an inductive approach in NVivo 12 (QSR International, Melbourne, Australia). For each session type, two coders (SI, ST) worked together to develop an initial codebook. Each coder coded the survey responses first independently, then met frequently to discuss new codes and resolve discrepancies for consensus coding. Then, a content analysis was conducted which identified general categories and grouped the generated codes under the relevant categories. A second iterative review of the codebook and free-text responses was conducted, and 2-3 relevant quotes were identified for each of the general categories.

Date Coverage: 2020-12-01 to 2021-07-01

Instrument and/or Software specifications: NA

Files contained here:

-DoT_March_Post-Survey.docx: Sample post-survey from March, 2021.

-De-identified_full_qualitative_data.xlsx: Full qualitative dataset divided by survey month.

-De-identified_full_quantitative_data_final.xlsx: Full quantitative dataset divided by survey month. First sheet includes the codebook for the likert scale data.

-Deidentified_FullQualitativeData_convertedToCSV.zip: .csv version of qualitative data (each sheet converted to .csv, plus .html visual representation of Excel file).

-Deidentified_FullQuantitativeData_convertedToCSV.zip: csv version of quantitative data (each sheet converted to .csv, plus .html visual representation of Excel file and formulas in .txt).

Use and Access:
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC 4.0)

To Cite Data:
Irani, S., Tolia, S., Finks, J., Sandhu, G. Doctors of Tomorrow: Evaluating the effectiveness and impact of a virtual medical pipeline program during the COVID-19 pandemic [Data set], University of Michigan - Deep Blue Data. https://doi.org/10.7302/4s9f-q855