4th year medical student Julie Ngo and 3rd year medical Njeru Muraguri are the recipients of this year’s Blake W.H. Smith Scholarship. They are using the Blake W.H. Smith Scholarship to create their TRICORDER project that focuses primarily on implementing a Digital Communication Assistance Tool (DCAT) to obtain the medical history of the Burmese population to see if patient satisfaction and outcomes improve.
The TRICORDER project will be conducted in partnership with Dr. Frank Muller of the Göttingen Institute of Primary Care, who was instrumental in conducting a pilot study that focused on implementing the DCAT tool with refugees in Germany who are navigating the German healthcare system but do not speak German as their native language.
“The Spectrum Health Residency Center, located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, serves over 500 refugee patients in our office, speaking a wide variety of languages. Within our practice, we identified deficiencies in our care of these non-English speaking patients. For example, the typical patient experience surveys are not available in many of their languages. Our team formed a Burmese-led focus group to identify better ways to improve care and pilot a patient survey that would be patient-centered.
This project is more than just implementing a digital tool. We believe by integrating the DCAT tool into our clinic, we can improve the efficiency, safety, and patient satisfaction of the Burmese population we serve. The DCAT has both the goal of immediate impact on current patients in our clinic speaking Burmese (approximately 150 in one year) and the potential to change how a non-English speaking patient’s journey is improved globally. Ultimately, we aim to scale this tool to be used throughout Spectrum Health in multiple languages to enhance patient care to all non-English speaking patients at Spectrum Health. We hope that this can lead to other future studies by comparing best practices globally.”
