Last week we were at the IACTE Conference and did a presentation about using an Academic EHR in the classroom. During the session we had help from our audience to come up with some great teaching tips and tools for Nutrition programs and Nutrition classes.
Here's an example (a more detailed lesson plan can be found in our Resource Library if you're an EHR Tutor customer):
- After a discussion of weight management and obesity, display a chart for a patient with weight management issues on your projector or smartboard.
- Have students review a summary of the patient and look for any information that may be related to the patient's diet.
- Is the patient's blood pressure in a normal range? If not, why might that be?
- Based on the patient's weight and height, what is his/her BMI? Is that number cause for concern?
- If you look into the patient's chart and find a list of lab work, do the cholesterol levels for the patient fall within a normal range?
- Review the Physician's Notes for the patient. How are the complications listed related to the patient's weight and, most likely, eating habits?
- After reviewing the patient's chart, have students come up with a dietary plan for that patient. To make things more complicated, feel free to add dietary restrictions to the patient's chart to see if students take those restrictions into account.
- To follow up in a future lesson, update the patient's chart and have students review it. Based on the lab results you've updated, do the students believe the patient has been following his/her dietary plan. Why or why not?
If the goal is always to relate lessons to the real world, what better way is there to do that than reviewing patient charts, just like students would with an actual person.
This same process can be applied when reviewing a
patient with diabetes (we have one in our patient templates if you're using EHR Tutor), bulemia or any other nutrition related disease/disorder.