How to deploy
This guide is for educational institutions using PKB to teach their students. Please read it alongside the How to Deploy Patients Know Best site and the PKB Manual.
Educational institutions must decide who their volunteer patients will be and how they will use the platform with their students. These are the three options:
Simulated: fictitious records and fictitious users on sandbox server
Hybrid: fictitious records and real patients on education server
Live: real records of real patients on production server
Models
1. Simulated: fictitious records and fictitious users education server
The earliest use of PKB for medical education purposes by University of Leicester Medical School started out with medical students using the platform to hone their digital communication skills. They practiced with fictitious patients acted out by individual volunteers.
The Leicester team defined a database of fictitious patients - giving these individuals fake names, demographics, illnesses, medications, and allergies.
A handful of volunteers operated the PKB platform and role-played their fictitious identity and their corresponding health in the PKB platform. Over time, the group of volunteers grew to enable more volunteers to interact in the PKB platform.
Each educational institution decides how to use PKB, including how and how often volunteers and students interact.
2. Hybrid: fictitious records and real patients on education server
In the hybrid model, working with real patients gives students more authenticity. The people who volunteer to support education are happy to bring their genuine health experiences and information. However, they do not use their real PKB record but create one on the education record. These individuals can conceal their identity if they wish MUST NOT enter their real health care identifiers number.
Recruiting volunteer patients:
Educators should ask existing volunteers – individuals with real health/medical conditions who work with students – to use PKB’s education server
PKB will ask existing PKB users to volunteer to create a fictitious record on the education server
PKB will ask all health care providers ask their PKB users to volunteer to create a fictitious record on the education server
3. Live: real records of real patients on production server
Once educational institutions have progressed with simulated and hybrid roll-out, they can start a Live roll-out. In this model, real patients open up their real record to students so the student can learn directly about real care.
The educators can ask their existing volunteers who already have real PKB records, and they can ask PKB to sign-post the educational institution’s readiness to existing PKB patients.
Adminstering PKB
Setting up educational organisation
Sign contract for educational use of PKB
Sign information sharing agreement with PKB
Choose who will register as coordinator users to configure your use of PKB with your educators and students
Coordinators attend one of the PKB training webinars
Coordinators set up your teams in PKB
Each team needs multiple coordinators to allow redundancy and annual leave (and each coordinator can administer multiple teams with one login for convenience and speed)
Each team has professional users (educators and students) and patient users (volunteers)
Consider all the teams you need across years and classes
Follow the instructions of deploy a new team in Deploy wiki
Create a naming convention for the teams created in PKB to reflect academic year and module eg. “2020 group 01”
Add all students as Professional Users to Your Student Year Group Team and their small group learning Teams
Allocate volunteer patients (with fake demographics) to student PKB teams
Add all educator who will be involved in monitoring the students’ use of PKB
Consider using features such as care planning and structured questionnaires in PKB
Setting up student users
Coordinator invites each student to register using the educational email address of the student
Each student registers for a PKB professional account to use the platform with any patient users
Students receive training in the use of PKB provide an introduction to Patients Know Best and a demonstration of how to use the PKB platform as a professional to all students
Educators provide scenarios, guidance and protocol around how to use PKB, this can include:
Do’s and don’ts of PKB/online etiquette
What functionality will you encourage the students to use
What rules will be applied to the student teams in PKB - how they curate responses to volunteer patients in the platform - encourage shared decision making
Setting up fictitious patients
All patient users on PKB’s education server are volunteers and these individuals are ‘actors’ in the environment.
Educators must decide how many patient users they need for their student. Typically, one patient user is needed for each group of students: the students need to have one patient user to interact with, and the patient user’s record should not be available to other students so interactions are separate across student groups. A single volunteer can still be acting with multiple patient users with multiple logins, supporting multiple student groups.
To register the patient users:
Create a CSV file of the required number of patient users
Each user needs an email address to receive the invite and fictitious demographics
Patients who don’t want to use their normal email address can set up another one free of charge on Gmail.com or hotmail.com and can do so with a fictitious identity
Upload the CSV to the umbrella team of your organisation
Pre-populate the fictitious patients’ records as required, e.g. with diagnoses, symptoms and allergies etc.
Give your fictitious patients a script and instructions to use PKB
Allocate each patient user to the relevant student team