BOSTON, December 1, 2021 – In May 2021, NEJM Group launched NEJM Healer, an interactive, online education application for teaching, exercising, and assessing clinical reasoning. With clinical reasoning instruction now integrated throughout medical education, NEJM Group saw a market need for a learning tool that offered evidence-based practice and assessment and targeted performance feedback on the diagnostic reasoning process.
NEJM Healer provides medical schools and other clinical training programs with engaging and realistic virtual patient encounters. The online product is built around a carefully designed library of illness scripts covering common diseases that students need to master for clinical practice. The patient cases, along with the underlying illness scripts, help measure students’ hypothesis-driven data selection and diagnostic reasoning skills. Users learn to gather patient data thoroughly but efficiently, create iterative problem representations, activate illness scripts, build broad differential diagnoses, and apply likelihood ratios to home in on lead diagnoses and create sound management plans.
After extensive use by over 500 student users spanning medical schools, physician assistant programs, and resident training programs, as well as feedback from educators, the NEJM Healer team is accelerating the expansion of the product’s case and illness script library heading into 2022. NEJM Group has turned to Kahun Ltd. to help power its illness script expansion.
Kahun Ltd., an early-stage med-tech company based in Israel, developed a clinical reasoning tool designed to assist medical providers at the point of care. Kahun’s technology relies on a high-quality, evidence-based “knowledge graph”, a relational network of over 20 million connections between thousands of diseases, complications, and findings, constructed using hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed medical articles. At the core of Kahun’s knowledge graph are illness scripts—disease representations using clinical data and their diagnostic relevance—and an AI engine which utilizes the graph for a given clinical presentation to generate evidence-based, real-time insights. “We are pleased to provide the NEJM Healer team with evidence-based illness scripts tailored to specific clinical presentations, taking into account individualized patient information and findings such as demographics, medical history, signs and symptoms, and diagnostic test results,” said Kahun’s co-founder and chief medical officer Michal Tzuchman Katz MD.
“NEJM Healer medical experts harness the AI-driven content from Kahun to create highly-curated illness scripts to expand our case library and help educators teach clinical reasoning through deliberate practice” said Jeffrey Drazen MD, Editor for NEJM Group. “Our platform and expanding body of content can easily integrate into schools’ existing curricula, whether clinical reasoning is taught early in a program or in the clinical years. With every online patient encounter, students hone their reasoning skills while developing clinically relevant knowledge based on expert illness scripts.” A broader library of patient cases will expose learners to a wider variety of disease presentations. “The cases in NEJM Healer will also promote a safe and fulfilling transition to clerkship and help clerkship faculty meet the educational requirements set forth by the national accrediting bodies to prepare students for residency,” noted Dr. Drazen.
For more information on NEJM Healer for your program go to: https://www.simulationiq.com/nejm-healer/
About Kahun
Based in Tel-Aviv, Israeli, Kahun is led by a team of successful internet technology veterans, including a pediatric specialist with years of experience in software engineering. The company was founded in 2018 with a seed grant from The Founders Kitchen, an investment fund led by Waze founder Uri Levine. In 2020, the Kahun team won a prestigious EU Horizon 2020 grant to advance its medical knowledge-mapping. Kahun offers a clinical reasoning mobile app for physicians currently is use by thousands of medical professionals worldwide. Kahun is also piloting a virtual-intake chatbot designed to help providers with professional pre-visit clinical intake.
About NEJM Group
NEJM Group creates high-quality medical resources for research, learning, practice, and professional development that are designed to meet the demand for essential medical knowledge and innovation among academic researchers and teachers, physicians, clinicians, executives, and others in health care. NEJM Group is a division of the Massachusetts Medical Society, publisher of the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM Journal Watch, NEJM Knowledge+, NEJM Catalyst, NEJM Resident 360, NEJM 医学前沿 (Yi Xue Qian Yan), and, our latest product, NEJM Healer.