MetroHealth is part of a two-year, $6.4 million collaborative grant award to educate Ohio’s Medicaid providers and other health care professionals in Ohio on key health issues impacting the state. This granted is awarded by the Ohio Department of Medicaid and administered from the Ohio Colleges of Medicine Government Resource Center.

The organizations collaborating together on this grant are Ohio University, Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) School of Medicine, University of Toledo, MetroHealth, and Equitas Health and through this funding they will be able to make virtual reality (VR) simulations that address three important issues: Maternal-Infant Health and Intimate Partner Violence, Health equity and cultural Humility for the LGBTQ+ community, and elder Abuse in Older Adults with Disabilities.

The purpose of these simulations are to help Ohio’s health care providers and their teams to be able to identify signs of elder abuse or intimate partner violence, as well as practice cultural humility in their care of all people.

The MetroHealth Simulation Institute’s (MSI) Thomas Noeller, MD, Medical Director is a Co-investigator, and Jackelyn Csank, MSI Institute Director, is the lead grant administrator for MetroHealth.

“The MetroHealth Simulation Institute (MSI) is honored to collaborate with wonderful partners throughout the State of Ohio to cerate and deploy impactful VR simulations that will lead to better health for our community,” Dr. Noeller said. “MetroHealth’s highly motivated subject matter experts are heavily involved in creating simulations that reflect important issues faced by many of our patients.”

“The hope is that through these scenarios providers will have a better understanding of and begin thinking about social determinants of health as they see their own patients,” Jackelyn said.

MetroHealth is providing experts throughout our system - including from Geriatrics, Emergency Medicine, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Family Medicine, The PRIDE Network, Social Work, Population Health, and the MetroHealth Institute for H.O.P.E. - to provide feedback on simulation knowledge and storylines. The MSI team will work with partners to construct educational content, film scenarios in Cleveland neighborhoods and clinical settings, and disseminate the simulations to a wide-ranging interprofessional and community audience.

The training materials are intended to help teams and individuals serving at-rsk populations to improve their quality of care and health outcomes, and more readily identify red flags and warning signs.

The CWRU School of Medicine’s project leads are Michael W. Konstan, MD, Co-investigator, and Elizabeth Littman, Executive Director of Government Relations and Strategic Initiatives, Community Health Programs, Center for Clinical Investigation, and previously led CWRU’s team that developed three equity VR training platforms.

Matt Love, virtual reality production coordinator for the Game Research and Immersive Design (GRID) Lab at OHIO, and Elizabeth Beverly, PhD, Osteopathic Heritage Foundations Ralph S. Licklider, DO, Endowed Professor in Behavioral Diabetes, as well as associate professor of primary care at the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine, will act as production coordinator, and primary investigator and medical and grant experts on the projects, respectively.