Cultural competence training in a global context

The issue of medical disparities that result from globally mobile populations has been largely overlooked in discussions of racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. Today, approximately one billion people traverse international borders each year. That number is expected to double in ten years. American medicine must adapt to the growing numbers of foreign immigrants, refugees, students, businesspeople and vacation travelers in the U.S. Modern air transportation enables persons from any virtually any point on the globe to reach your home town in less than 48 hours. In a global world, disease is no longer local.

Given this increasingly global context, providers must broaden their cultural competence as well as their medical skills and knowledge. In particular, providers must be able to recognize, diagnose and treat infections and diseases not often encountered in the U.S. over the past several decades. Further, clinicians must recognize that even common diseases may present or respond to therapy differently in persons with variable background. Clinical competency in a globally mobile world requires providers to constantly consider who their patients are (country of origin) and their past and recent travel history. It also requires that providers master a whole new set of clinical and cultural competencies.

Following a discussion of the trends/issues noted above by physicians who are experts in global medicine, we will demonstrate how to put these new clinical competencies into practice through a series of cross-cultural patient case studies. This demonstration will showcase a new e-learning program called Viewpoints: Clinical Competence in a Globally Mobile World. Viewpoints, whose development was sponsored by Wellpoint and developed by Critical Measures, is the first e-learning program in the U.S. (or the world for that matter) to simultaneously address issues of racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare, language access issues and medical disparities that result from globally mobile populations.

Viewpoints’ offers six interactive cross-cultural patient case studies. Although each patient has similar presenting symptoms (fever, flu-like condition) the correct differential diagnosis is radically different in each case. Further, each case requires providers to confront their own unconscious biases in interesting and challenging ways. All of the cases provide the very latest in interdisciplinary scholarship since each case offers medical/clinical, legal and cross-cultural advice from experts in each field. (That’s why the product is called Viewpoints…) Finally, given the growing emphasis on effective communication between patient and provider (from the CLAS standards, the Joint Commission and the NCQA), all six cases contain unique communication challenges that could negatively impact patient trust and the medical outcome of the case.

Our panel discussion will conclude with a representative from Wellpoint who will discuss how one of the nation’s leading healthplans intends to use the Viewpoints e-learning program to educate its network providers and address medical disparities that result from globally mobile populations.