Labs that require a "patient" for clinical demonstrations

General Tips

• Determine if community volunteers will sign consent forms, and if so, how. This decision is often made at the university or department-level. However, if your school requires consent forms from community volunteers, you will need to advise students on the protocol and provide a place for them to upload their releases.

• Introduce practice with community volunteers at the beginning of the term. Consider adding text or video content that orients students to working with community volunteers and sets appropriate expectations for the time commitment. This will give students enough time to find suitable volunteers early on. Remind students that community volunteers should be healthy and not have any injuries or conditions that might be aggravated unknowingly.

• Do not ask your students to perform any technique or exercise on their community volunteers that requires an instructor’s oversight to avoid injury. Consider alternative activities or teaching methods if there is any concern that a technique or exercise may result in injury to an otherwise healthy person.

• Highlight abnormal examples in the async or sync components. Because students will be working with healthy volunteers, it is important that the async and sync content references the realities for people with impairments or pathologies. This can be achieved through lecture, video demonstrations, third-party content, and filmed personal testimonials.

• Consider what equipment students have access to at home. If the lab requires specialized equipment, such as a wheelchair, students will need to purchase the item, or the lab will need to be re-worked so the equipment is not necessary.

• Ask students to record their practice sessions. Assignments that include community volunteers typically ask students to record and upload videos of their practice sessions so that they can get feedback from their instructor and/or peers and prove that they did the assignment. These videos can be uploaded to assignment pages for instructor view only, or to discussion forums for peer feedback. Instructors can also play submitted videos in the Live Session for real-time feedback.

• Evaluate possible HIPAA concerns if using patient videos to demo techniques, procedures, or conditions. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) works to ensure that individuals’ health information is properly protected while allowing the flow of health information between organizations and individuals. HIPAA regulated data includes any health information about an identifiable individual held or transmitted by a covered entity or its business associate, commonly referred to as “protected health information.” Under HIPAA, 2U would be considered a business associate whenever a university partner requires us to process existing HIPAA regulated data or to create HIPAA regulated data. 2U strives to avoid the hosting HIPAA regulated data in our systems.

If you have existing HIPAA regulated data, such as slide content or videos that feature patients, you can:

• Link out to existing HIPAA regulated course materials that live in your university’s own HIPAA-compliant system. Students will need to be provisioned with direct access to that system as well.

• Play existing, non-2U produced HIPAA regulated data, such as patient videos, in a NON-RECORDED Live Session. Our Zoom sessions are not HIPAA compliant so if you would like to play these videos, you must first turn off the recording. You can restart recording after covering the content specific to the patient.

Course Template

Jump-start your design process using the tailored course template below.