Our Aim & Scope
To address rising healthcare costs while honoring medicine’s social contract—to advance patient welfare, respect patient autonomy &dignity, and promote justice—medical educators have increasingly partnered with experts in public health, the social sciences, and behavioral sciences. Yet, despite this valuable collaboration, health disparities persist, clinician and trainee burnout is growing, and public trust in the medical profession continues to decline.
Educators at Purple Coat seek to strengthen these cross-disciplinary efforts by introducing three complementary approaches:
Design Thinking, a human-centered, empathetic, and systems-oriented method of problem solving from architecture and design;
Conceptual Thinking, a philosophical approach that supports abstraction, insight generation, and hypothesis development across disciplines; and
Critical Thinking, a humanities-based method of analysis that builds autonomy and helps navigate complexity and uncertainty.
By integrating creative, conceptual, and critical thinking into medical education, Purple Coat collaborators aim to foster deeper collaboration across disciplines, create more inclusive and resilient learning environments, and ultimately improve health outcomes for individuals, families, and communities.
Our Curriculum Initiatives
Scalar Health
Dr. Marin Gillis (PhD, LPh Philosophy), Professor Kendra Kirchmer (BArch, MFA), Dr. Luther Brewster (PhD, Public Health) and Dr. Pedro Jose Greer, Jr (MD, FACP, FACG) have created a framework for Design Thinking applied to medical education to address the social determinants of health: Scalar Health. Scalar Health considers three interacting scales of inquiry: 1) the individual scale; 2) the dwelling scale (the places where people live, work, and play and the interdependent relationships between the people who dwell therein); and, 3) the community scale (populations, and the experience of the broader physical environment and the variety of policy decisions that shape it locally and globally).
Dr. Gillis, Professor Kirchmer, Dr. Brewster and Dr. Greer are preparing a manuscript describing a novel educational intervention applying this model.
Dr. Gillis and Professor Kirchmer have work on studios in medical education and applying design thinking to teach the social determinants of health in medical education accepted at the CHCI Health and Medical Humanities Summer Institute: Space, Place, and Design in the Medical and Health Humanities, (June 25-27, 2020, postponed), hosted by the College of Architecture at the University of Southern Denmark and at the international Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education (Paris June 2020, postponed).
Dr. Gillis, Professor Kirchmer, and Dr. Dharam Persaud-Sharma (PhD Engineering, MS 2019) presented curricula that applies Scalar Health to the issue of healthy eating at the Institute for the Improvement of Healthcare (IHI) Annual National Forum in Orlando, Florida (Dec. 2018).
Creative Thinking and Inclusive Communication
Dr. Marin Gillis and Professor Kendra Kirchmer have created a version of Design Thinking in Medicine directed towards general skill development outcomes in medical education rather than product design or leadership outcomes. They have presented this approach to faculty of the Department of Humanities, Health, and Society at the Florida International University College of Medicine (Miami, Fl 2019) and at the international Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education (Paris 2019).
Dr. Marin Gillis and Professor Kendra Kirchmer have developed innovative interventions applying active learning to argument diagramming to enhance medical student creative, conceptual and critical thinking skills individually and in teams. The two areas of contention include physician conscientious objection and prophylactic mastectomy. Their work has been presented was accepted for presentation at the 2019 International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) in Roanoke, VA (June 2019) and the Society of Teachers in Family Medicine (STFM) 2020 Medical Student Education Conference in Portland, OR (Jan-Feb 2020).
Professor Kendra Kirchmer and Dr. Marin Gillis have produced and disseminated curriculum on inclusive communication including the module ”Drawing for Informed Consent,” which has been presented at American Association of Medical College (AAMC)-Southern Group on Educational Affairs (2018) and is published on Bioethics Education Resources (BEdR). In addition to the Florida International University College of Medicine, this intervention has also been piloted at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine, Lexington (2019)
Ethics and Shared Decision Making
Elan Baskir (MS2020), Dr Gillis, Dr. Kashan and others have developed an innovative ethics intervention for an M1 pharmacology course to prepare students to effectively communicate with pharmaceutical representatives. Quantitative data from class pre- and post- surveys was presented at the 18th Word Congress on Basic and Clinical Pharmacology (Kyoto, Japan, 2018) and the teaching intervention was chosen as part of the inaugural “Teaching Blitz” session at the 2019 Experimental Biology Conference. They also presented a poster at the AAMC-SGEA Meeting in Orlando, FL (April 2019) and published an article in the Medical Science Educator (2020).
Dr. Rebeca Martinez (OBGYN, MHE), Professor Liana Perez-Loughlin, Dr. Marin Gillis, and Dr. Amy DeBaets (PhD, DTh, MDiv, MA) have developed curriculum to advance shared decision making in obstetrics which they presented at the international Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education (Paris 2019).
Dr. Sanaz Kashan (IM, Geriatrics, Palliative Med), Dr. Marin Gillis, Dr. Marcos Milanez (Fam Med, Geriatrics), Dr. Michael Mintzer (IM, Geriatrics), Dr. Chris Degnon (Fam Med, MPH) and Dr. Elizabeth Grey (IM) have produced program development reports on Advance Care Planning curricula that have been presented at the International Conference on Clinical Ethics and Consultation (Singapore 2017), the international Cambridge Consortium for Bioethics Education (Paris 2017), and the AAMC-Lead Serve Lead Conference, Entrusbable Professional Activities Poster Session (Seattle 2016). Drs. Kashan and Gillis have also received funding for this curriculum from The Arnold P. Gold Foundation.