Vani Patterson, MPH
Administrative Director for the Center of IPE
University of Michigan
Vani Patterson serves as the Administrative Director for the University of Michigan Center for Interprofessional Education. Her early career spanned politics in Washington, D.C. to community nutrition in Detroit. When she returned to the U-M in 2013, she joined the Adolescent Health Initiative to consult health care teams across the country to improve patient-centered care for adolescents. In witnessing the profound impact of collaborative care in the practice setting, Ms. Patterson was drawn to the work of the Center for IPE. Her current interests are in transforming the education of pre-health professionals to enable the future of collaborative care.

Presenting at the Nexus Summit:

BackgroundImplicit bias among health professionals fosters disparities across groups of patients. This qualitative study aims to determine how an interprofessional education (IPE) experiential program, using social determinants of health (SDH) as its framework, influenced early health profession students’ to consider SDH as they develop awareness regarding their interprofessional identity when interacting with patients. MethodologyThe Longitudinal Interprofessional Family-Based Experience (LIFE), an 11-week experiential IPE program, engaged early health professional learners through two…
Background Introductory experiential interprofessional education (IPE) is necessary for health profession students to develop team skills. Meaningful engagement with patients provides an authentic experience for students, and patients can also provide feedback about team performance. The objective of this analysis was to determine the agreement of student and family/patient evaluation of team skills and to compare these to expert ratings. These analyses provide insight into future training for student and patient ratings of team performance. MethodologyThe Longitudinal Interprofessional…
In the summer of 2020, the University of Michigan’s Health Science Council of Deans (HSC) and Center for Interprofessional Education (C-IPE) were united by a desire to collectively address health inequities in society. The HSC charged the C-IPE to bring together dean-appointed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) leads from 9 of our 10 health science schools, as well as students, patients, and DEI experts to lead the first stage of this effort. The goal was to gain an understanding of the current state of anti-racism and IPE intersections, individual school/college efforts on DEI and anti-…