Mitchell Heflin, MD, MHS
Director, Duke Health Center for Interprofessional Education and Care
Duke University
Mitchell T. Heflin, MD, MHS, is Associate Dean and Director of the Center for Interprofessional Education and Care (IPEC) and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Geriatrics for Duke University School of Medicine and is a Senior Fellow in the Aging Center at Duke. Dr. Heflin brings a wealth of experience in interprofessional practice, care and education from his work in geriatrics. As a seasoned educator who values relationship-building, creativity, and robust evaluation when developing innovative education programming at Duke, he is interested in promoting innovative educational curricula for all types and levels of health professionals.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic drastically expanded reliance on virtual care in clinical practice, as it offers increased flexibility and expanded access to care, particularly for patients with complex medical needs who are disproportionately impacted by non-medical drivers of health. Hotspotting programs partner health professions students with patients identified as “high utilizers” of health care resources in order to address social barriers to health, improve access to primary care, and reduce patient emergency department overutilization. Telehealth offers a solution to common social…
Early interprofessional education (IPE) experiences can optimally position students for ongoing interprofessional learning and practice. A team from an academic health center’s newly established Center for Interprofessional Education and Care collaborated to create virtual IPE events for three different health professions programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.The purpose of this session is to describe the virtual IPE “Primer” learning experiences, instructional content, evaluation outcomes, and perspectives of the interprofessional planning group. These events established early integration of…
Establishing robust interprofessional education programs requires work on institution culture, policy, logistics, and finance across a wide range of stakeholders. In 2019, Duke Health opened the Interprofessional Education and Care (IPEC) Center to promote interprofessional teamwork across campus. The IPEC Director looked to the leader of the Duke Academy for Health Professions Education and Academic Development (AHEAD), an organization founded in 2014 focused on faculty development, for “organizational mentoring” in navigating key steps in the center’s development. In this talk, we, as the…
People living with dementia are vulnerable to inequitable care related to ageism and ableism. In the inpatient setting, these patients are at nutritional risk due to high rates of delirium, impaired communication, and dysphagia. Specialized team-based, interprofessional approaches to care can improve nutrition, but many providers and staff are not aware of these. In this talk, we will describe an interprofessional curriculum to address this.Our educational team includes an occupational therapist, registered dietitian, speech-language pathologists, geriatrician, nurses, and a physician…
The COVID-19 pandemic led health systems to increasingly rely on telehealth for patient care. Despite rapidly changing clinical and regulatory environments, most healthcare providers and students were not equipped with formal training in telehealth-specific skills. With support from the American Medical Association, we convened an interprofessional team of clinicians and student leaders from UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke to develop a virtual interprofessional telehealth curriculum. The curriculum consisted of five, 90-minute, online interactive course sessions, including an introduction to…