What is PediaHealth Basics?
PediaHealth Basics is a training program that all PediaHealth team members must regularly undergo to maintain functional literacy. Functional literacy measures your ability to manage information: obtaining information and synthesizing information (Institute of Medicine, 2004). PediaHealth Basics is administered via Google Classroom. To participate, join the Class. Those who wish to join the class, but are not PediaHealth team members, may request to join the class.
Google Classroom Basics
Refer to Google's guides on the Basics.
Functional Literacy
Unlike literacy, which are rudimentary skills such as reading, writing, and speaking, functional literacy is a relative measure defined by PediaHealth's mission, goals, and work. In other words, for PediaHealth to function, its team members must be literate in terms of systems, processes, and regulations within which PediaHealth operates. For instance, PediaHealth is a VFC Provider. Therefore, PediaHealth team members must be fluent in the terms and systems of the VFC program.
Functional literacy corelates to competence. PediaHealth Basics continually improves your ability to retrieve and obtain health and medical information, which is a prerequisite for acquiring and maturing your skills and knowledge as a healthcare professional and/or clinician. Functional literacy evaluations will indicate to you and your colleagues what you know, and competency evaluations will indicate how well you apply what you know. These two broad and general areas will either increase or decrease PediaHealth's quality of patient care.
PediaHealth Basics is administered through Google Classroom. Classes use, in turn, other learning tools and media, such as Quizizz. The content and information published on Google Classroom Quizizz
Culture Shock
In medical training, your studies focused on the medical sciences of healthcare and the art of bedside manner. For those who leave academia and research, culture shock is common. Recall that culture shock is the idea of —upon landing in a new country or region— experiencing disorientation due to the "rearrangement" of the elements of culture: language, ways of doing daily and other routine things, etc. Language and the ways of doing things are the two areas we focus on in PediaHealth Basics.
Healthcare Literacy
American Healthcare is incredibly complex, convoluted and chaotic, that it often doesn't resemble anything "systematic" [intuitively, anyway]. Visit any of the world's densest cities or metros, and you'll find such complexity:
Chaotic: quantity defines chaos, that is: the quantity of disparate, seemingly unrelated things going on at once
Convoluted: series and lines of concurrent activities, seemingly unrelated, running at unrelated velocities and in seemingly equally unrelated directions
And arcane: not merely esoteric, but incredibly old —again, high quantities: decades, even millennia. The practice of medicine is as old as humanity. Something so practical, prevalent, and yet so old is bound to carry arcane characteristics.
Within the context of healthcare as this chaotic, convoluted, and arcane universe, we must impose the idea of being a polyglot, hoping that we will not be overwhelmed. Because without realizing it, you are already one. The densest economies of the world force their citizens to be. Older generations can't adopt smartphone apps as quickly as teenagers, not because teenagers are in a unique neurophysiological age of plasticity—which they are—, but because older generations have already learned so many languages over their lives. Software such as apps on phones [which we'll invariably touch on] aren't systems of technicality as much as they are simply media—in the way that a sheet of paper is media. And app buttons create a system of reading and writing that adds the simple dimension of "engagement:" pressing, clicking, swiping, etc.
Thus, it is one of the more important objectives of PediaHealth Basics: to teach you to quickly learn new languages, keep old languages, and teach languages to others.
Learning Systems.
The only way to maintain mobility in healthcare is to develop a system for quickly adopting new languages. The number of medical specialties has only increased over the years, and the velocity at which this number increases will only increase itself. In the 2000s, the AAMC began publishing cultural competency guides for medical school admissions directors. This was a solution to the problem presented in aggregate data that essentially painted a tragedy: solutions to health and medical problems that cost lives were present. Still, they were "not getting through" due to communication errors: language-based communication errors, mostly.
Knowledge Systems.
The rudimentary prowess of AI is a consequence of the digitization of humanity's work: the socialization that we perform; the intimacy that we serve; the industries that we perform in: all work that is growing more and more digital over time [and the tide seems unlikely to turn in the other direction any time soon]. As AI draws on the power of big data, so do healthcare practitioners. To this, we often face the intuitive concern: How do we keep old languages while adding new ones, and not adding more capacity to store the running number of languages? The well-established retort is: First, you'd be surprised by how many languages one can contain [Materially, the extent is more than 40 languages— so far.] And second, as time is a weight that only grows heavier, the understandable preoccupation in this area is practicality. How can I do this when I'm already so stressed and busy? To grossly generalize: we practice what we invented and imposed on machines: data compression, just-in-time resources, etc. For instance, many technical writers today don't "write from scratch", but rather ask machines such as search engines and AI writing assistants to write out the generic context from which the writer can imbue his creative flesh and texture. We will provide practical examples later in this OER.