Ohio-based Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and Wisconsin-based Marquette Nursing are among the first users of Epic’s new Lyceum platform, which aims to provide first-year medical and nursing students with a solid introduction to using electronic health records early in their healthcare training.
Lyceum provides students and faculty with access to an Epic training environment, including dozens of test patients with diverse background and clinical case histories, as well as online learning modules and training materials based on best practices learned from Epic’s 40-plus years in the EHR field.
Most students will use Epic at some point in their clinical rotations. Prior to Lyceum, students were only able to use parts of Epic’s software in hospitals; they would have to pass an exam and become nurses to access the rest. That’s about to change: students will now have access to professional tools through the Lyceum platform. Starting this semester, Marquette Nursing students are using Epic’s Lyceum platform, an educational version of the EHR software used in many hospitals. Lyceum provides nursing students with an introduction to a crucial function of their future jobs.
“Nurses have to document vital signs, incident reports, progress notes — you have all the documentation from physicians or other health care providers; it can be very complicated,” said Alicia Davis, M.S.N., R.N., a clinical instructor in the College of Nursing, in a statement.
“Being able to offer our students experience on industry-standard software from a leading health technology company is a game-changer for our college,” said Jill Guttormson, Ph.D., M.S., R.N., dean of the College of Nursing, in a statement. “We pride ourselves on producing nurses who are well-prepared for practice. Skilled, ethical use of medical records is a major part of that. Working with Epic allows our students to enter their clinical sites and first nursing jobs fully equipped to use an EHR for documentation and understanding their patient’s trajectory while remaining focused on providing holistic care.”
“Our goal in creating Lyceum is to simplify access to the EHR experience for future healthcare professionals,” said Seth Howard, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, in a statement. “Epic is excited to play a part in nursing education, and we have enjoyed working with Marquette as the first nursing school collaborator.”
Within Lyceum, faculty can add a health records component to their classes. Anne Costello, director of the college’s Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare Center for Clinical Simulation, gave the example of a post-operation patient who was experiencing blood loss and had to receive a transfusion. Students would go into Lyceum and correctly fill out the patient documentation that would correspond to the scenario.
“We’re hoping that working with Lyceum strengthens students’ readiness for practice,” Costello said, in a statement. “When they graduate, they should be able to walk onto a unit or into a clinic, wherever they want to go, and be ready to do what’s required of them.”
Along with student resources comes faculty training assets designed to help professors integrate Epic into their curriculum. These include sample workflows, resources for identifying the right training patient to use for different scenarios, and a “Lyceum Behind the Scenes” class to familiarize faculty with the platform and resources.
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine began using Lyceum with its medical student class in July 2023.
“Early medical students will learn how to find and record patient information, and reconcile and correct data, with a specific focus on areas where they can add value to their clinical teams at our affiliate healthcare institutions,” said Anastasia Rowland-Seymour, M.D., associate professor of medicine and assistant dean for longitudinal clinical education at the School of Medicine, in a statement. “This training will help our students learn how to move the needle on health equity, even in the early stages of their learning.”
David Kaelber, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., professor of internal medicine, pediatrics and population and quantitative health sciences and chief medical informatics officer of the MetroHealth System has been part of the partnership involved in the development of Lyceum over the last year. He noted that the American Association of Medical Colleges has been recommending integrating informatics-related learning objectives and tools starting in the pre-clinical years of medical school for decades, “but in my experience many medical students still come to their clinical rotations without much or even any formal EHR training,” he said in a statement. “Lyceum will change that. This will be better for students, faculty, staff and patients because these future doctors will be more efficient and effective with EHRs now and in their future.”
