Grant Specific Aims

Specific Aim 1: Build Structure to allow governance and foster collaboration in the CAM curriculum development project. OHSU will institute an Advisory Council to supervise the project, implement a new CAM Sciences Committee to design the OHSU SOM curriculum, and create an Evaluation Team for assessing and measuring outcomes of the project. These three committees will all include CAM educators and researchers working together with OHSU faculty committed to an evidence-based model of CAM education.

Specific Aim 2: Create a longitudinal Evidence-Based CAM Curriculum. Starting with the OHSU School of Medicine, the CAM Sciences Committee will design and implement CAM curriculum for firsth to fourth year medical students (MS1-MS4), along with their faculty training and development. This curriculum will then be adapted to a web-based platform and offered as the Oregon CAM Continuing Medical Education (CME) Course for clinicians. A multidisciplinary integrative case conference will be initiated for both curriculum content and an initial MS4 elective. An innovative CAM history and physical exam tool will be piloted in this MS4 elective. Additional MS4 electives and integrative experiences for family medicine residents will be developed. Physician assistant student curriculum will be developed concurrently. Once implementation has succeeded in the SOM, we will then develop and initiate seed curriculum and CME in the OHSU dietetic intern programs, OHSU School of Nursing (SON) and OHSU School of Dentistry (SOD).

Specific Aim 3: Evaluate the success of this educational project through a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. The evaluation results will inform the academic community of our successful efforts and indicate approaches that will be helpful in introducing CAM curriculum in other academic settings. Since we may be the first to experience collaboration between these numbers of academic institutions in CASM education, we aim to evaluate both the curriculum developed and the process of collaboration amongst educators that was taken to define and implement that curriculum. Knowledge, attitudes and skills of students will be evaluated through a combination of surveys, essays, exams, focus groups, interviews, and observations. The curricular evaluation will serve as a roadmap to other institutions as to how to develop, impellent and evaluate a CAM curriculum. Collaboration will be evaluated based on recorded sessions, individual random interviews, and the Qualitative Research Solutions QSR-5 tool. These evaluations will provide guidance for further innovative collaboration between CAM educators, researchers and allopathic medical institutions.

Specific Aim 4: Dissemination of CAM curriculum and knowledge. Through a stepwise approach, we will disseminate the developed curriculum and learned knowledge from the process of collaboration between CAM academic and allopathic health sciences institutions. We are committed to the early and through dissemination of the developed CAM curriculum and evaluation knowledge through our Web-based Oregon CAM Course and the Oregon CAM Course website. In addition, we will use the existing NCCAM Center conferences, the OHSU Women’s Health Conference, the Oregon CAM Lecture Series, local and national professional and public meetings, and distance learning video conferencing. Publication in academic journals will be expected, and a book on the process of collaboration is planned.