Background/Purpose: Gout is the most common type of inflammatory arthritis in the U.S., affecting 4% of the population. Gout also has a large impact on health care costs in the U.S. with $6 billion dollars spent annually. Over 2 million visits to primary care providers (PCP) each year are gout related. Despite modern advancements and the availability of reference tools, the current care from PCPs is felt to be suboptimal in the U.S. Barriers to improving care in gout include limited education during medical training, perception of non-importance by providers, and the lack of PCP continuing medical education. In an attempt to address limited education during training, we developed a digital adjunctive teaching tool, GoutPro, on the topic of gout. Utilizing a clinically integrative model proposed by Khan et al, it takes into consideration different learning styles, current guidelines on gout, interactive activities and clinical problem solving. The overall the goal of our teaching intervention is to improve medical trainee knowledge and interest in gout.

Methods: 15 medical residents and students from the University of Minnesota participated in a 1 hour GoutPro teaching session. The session was a Fellow led didactic using our GoutPro software. GoutPro is a hybrid software that incorporates presentation ability, audience participation, clinical simulation and mini-games. GoutPro is structured with lecture content on slides with multiple choice questions integrated evenly throughout. Within the lecture content, we also incorporated competitive scored mini-games to increase audience participation and satisfaction. At the end of the session, there was a simulation in which participants made clinical decisions based on an evolving scenario. Feedback was provided on choices participants made at the end. Participants utilized their smart devices to operate GoutPro as a means of interacting anonymously during the session. Our primary outcome measure was participant satisfaction assessed by post-session survey. Our secondary outcome measure was level of interest in the topic of gout, educational value of the tool, and usefulness of the tool also assessed by a post-session survey. A descriptive analysis of the data was performed.

Results:

Conclusion: In conclusion, the GoutPro session was effective, fun, interactive and educational. All participants were satisfied with the session. Our study demonstrates that GoutPro can be used as a teaching tool to increase participant satisfaction and interest. Further studies will be needed to assess change in knowledge and quality measures.