SimuVersity Medical Center: Pain and opioid management training in diverse patient populations

Summary Management of chronic pain and opioid use/misuse is challenging for clinicians and students, especially when working with diverse and underserved patient populations. Not all people are affected by chronic pain and opioid use concerns equally, and there are higher prevalence rates in women, individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and people residing in rural areas. Medical and health professional schools, students and practitioners need more educational resources to help address the complex problems associated with the management of chronic pain, opioid use, and the impact of diversity on clinical outcomes. Very few low-cost, flexible, highly-engaging, and effective learning resources are available to help the healthcare workforce best learn to manage these unique health concerns. Gamification holds promise as a user-friendly, fun, engaging and effective teaching strategy, especially for healthcare applications. Palmetto Innovative Education LLC provides innovative software and gaming solutions to help engage interprofessional teams of healthcare students, researchers and clinicians with unique training opportunities. We seek to develop a convenient and engaging educational platform to provide training in pain and opioid management as well as teach empirically-supported communication strategies for optimizing treatment adherence. Typically, training health professional students and practitioners via traditional didactic approaches falls short of engaging learners in a manner that promotes application of knowledge. Conversely, gamification offers a lower- cost, high quality, standardized, easily-accessible and flexible approach to healthcare provider education that promotes application of acquired knowledge and increased engagement of learners. Palmetto Innovative Education seeks to capitalize on the PI’s expertise as a pain management clinician/educator and scientist, and combine these skills with his company’s game development expertise and experience to create a novel, innovative and engaging educational game platform for teaching students and practitioners alike about modern, empirically-supported strategies for pain and opioid management. In this phase-I project, we seek to: (Aim-1) Develop a multi-platform educational and interactive 3D digital game (SimuVersity Medical Center) to teach health professional students and practicing clinicians modern and empirically validated strategies for pain and opioid management in patients from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds and with a variety of presenting pain and substance use problems, and (Aim-2) Compare the effectiveness of this new educational activity/game in meeting clinical learning objectives and outcomes compared to traditional didactic approaches to provider and student education.