NEWS

Louisiana Tech University’s Department of Health Informatics and Information Management and the Division of Nursing hosted a collaborative project through a virtual escape room in which students from both disciplines could work together to solve common issues in the healthcare industry.

The virtual escape rooms provided students with a uniquely interprofessional, collaborative learning experience that builds clinical knowledge and provides an opportunity for practical application of management principles.

This project, created by faculty from the nursing and HIIM departments at Louisiana Tech, introduced students to real-world scenarios in which the nursing and HIIM departments intersect within the healthcare industry.

“As instructors, we wanted to give our students some hands-on, “real-world” experience by working through a case study scenario in which they were required to rely on each other’s areas of expertise within healthcare,” Lauren Colvin, an instructor of health informatics and information management said.

15 students from the two programs took part in the virtual escape room program. The “rooms” covered three topics, challenging students to answer questions related to uncovering an incident in a case study scenario, filling an occurrence report and completing a Root Cause Analysis (RCA).

After the activity, students completed the National League of Nurses self-confidence in simulation scale to gain information on the student experience while participating in the project. Melissa Madden, assistant professor in the Division on Nursing, designed the virtual escape rooms for the project and oversees the Institutional Review Board research on student responses to the simulation scale.

“The research indicated that the virtual escape room design is an effective teaching method for building students’ self-confidence in learning and mastering the content of the simulation,” Madden said. 

For more information on the Division of Nursing, the Department of Health Informatics and Information Management and other programs within the College of Applied and Natural Sciences, visit ans.latech.edu.