Invited Multidisciplinary Outreach to Improve Search Skills in an Academic Medical Center

A new graduate degree program was created at a large urban hospital in Los Angeles. The premise was to provide students with tools to support emerging and innovative trends in health care. This provided a great multidisciplinary outreach opportunity for the library which provided a class on literature searching in addition to one-on-one consultations to the medical center employees who enrolled in the course. Healthcare is changing rapidly with the introduction of new information technologies, digital health, wearable technologies, data analytics, and valuebased healthcare performance (1,2). To prepare medical staff for emerging trends in healthcare, a large urban academic medical center introduced a new accredited graduate program, Master of Health Delivery Science (MHDS). The 20-month curriculum is organized around four academic cores: Data Collection and Analytics, Healthcare Finance, Performance Improvement, and Healthcare Informatics. Each core comprises two to four modules completed during the first 16 months of the program, with the program culminating in a capstone project integrating the learning from the cores. The program was offered nationwide and has enrolled about 16–25 students annually since its inception in 2017. Students come from varied healthcare backgrounds, including physicians, nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists, administrators, laboratory, clinical research, and information technology providing a multidisciplinary outreach experience for the library. Classes are taught in the evenings. Many of these students were hospital employees and several were affiliated with other institutions. The library was asked to take part in the Quality and Safety module of the Performance Improvement Core. In this module, students learn how to develop quality or safety improvement projects and learn how to evaluate the improvement by using appropriate measures.