De Gagne Submits Josiah Macy Jr. Faculty Scholars Application

Kudos to Jennie De Gagne for the submission of her Josiah Macy Jr. Faculty Scholars application entitled "Development and Implementation of Interprofessional Cybercivility Teaching and Learning Resources: Toward the Quadruple Aim." This proposal requests funding for a two-year period with a start date of Sept. 1, 2018. 

Despite highly stressful and demanding environments, health professionals are expected to display a high level of professionalism and ethical standards while constantly meeting patients’ complex care needs. The goal is achievement of the Quadruple Aim in health care: enhance the patient’s experience, improve population health, reduce costs, and avoid provider burnout; however, the emergence of disruptive technologies in health care coupled with growing responsibilities can lead to provider stress and burnout. Unresolved stress and burnout can trigger job dissatisfaction, turnover, and various forms of workplace incivility that have negative consequences for patients as well as the professionals well-being.

For health professionals, workplace incivility is linked to burnout, low self-worth, lack of confidence, and low commitment to their profession. From an organization’s standpoint, this is likely a drain on productivity, employee morale, patient safety, and quality care. In addition to workplace incivility, academic incivility in health professions education is of great concern as it can create a strain on students’ learning outcomes. The ubiquitous incivility in health care and education is worrisome considering that our nation is facing a looming health care workforce shortage and rising costs. Thus, attention to incivility is a part of addressing the fourth goal of the Quadruple Aim, which emphasizes the providers’ well-being.

In recent years, incivility, particularly cyberincivility—breaches of civility in cyberspace— has become a high-profile issue among health professionals, students, and faculty. Cyberincivility could be increasingly deleterious to professional and organizational well-being given today’s fast-paced and technology-driven health care system. A growing body of evidence supports the need to educate current and future health professionals about improving communications skills and understanding roles and responsibilities in computer-mediated interactions. Yet, many existing studies on the topic are limited to intraprofessional endeavors, focusing on the development of strategies within a discipline while ignoring the value of knowledge sharing across the professions. Hence, the emphasis of this project is on building IPE cybercivility repositories to teach students and faculty. With this goal in mind, project objectives are to: (a) develop a web-based teaching toolkit of sentinel events on uncivil use of information technologies; (b) pilot a cybercivility learning mobile package containing experiential games; (c) lead a workgroup as a content expert in the development of cybercivility guidelines; and (d) using a logic model, evaluate the impact of the innovation with respect to feasibility, acceptability, scalability, and generalizability.