Mitzi Scotten, M.D., joined NYITCOM-Arkansas as a full-time faculty member in 2020. She serves as the director of simulation and is a member of the clinical medicine faculty. Scotten is a board-certified pediatrician and a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics. She practices pediatrics at the NYITCOM Medical Clinic in Jonesboro. Before taking on her current role, Scotten served as an adjunct faculty member for NYITCOM as she trained third and fourth-year medical students through their pediatric rotations at a local clinic.
Exploring new concepts on how to improve the practice of future physicians has been a career mission since her introduction to medical education research in 2008. From Scotten’s first days as the director of a pediatric clerkship at the University of Kansas, she began seeking innovative methods to advance learning using technology, communication education, and inter-professional collaboration. With minimal experience, Scotten started with small medical alumni grants and explored areas of research well ahead of its time including a project assessing the utility of using electronic health record platforms in interprofessional simulation and introduction of the EHR to students in the third year of medical school. Additional initial grants included setting up interprofessional pediatric simulations involving four health professions, assessing team communication and faculty debriefing during those simulations, and inquiring into medical adherence in the cystic fibrosis populations. In her first career, as a registered nurse, Scotten witnessed the impact of poor communication between healthcare professions, and it has been a lifelong mission to make communication skills as important as physical exam skills across all student health professions.
This introductory research led her to collaborate with six different health professions for the ICAP (Interprofessional Collaborative Acute Care Practice) project. On this $985,000 HRSA grant, Scotten served as medical lead and was instrumental in the design and execution of the three-year project. She learned a great deal about large, nationally funded grants and the need for strong inter-team communication. The ICAP project led the institution to take a deeper dive into areas of team communication and the use of interprofessional simulation and successfully changed many of the philosophies on how to train hospital teams, and students, in basic communication skills and, more importantly, to apply those tenets to working models of change.
The ICAP project also resulted in a wave of increased interprofessional dialogues that included mandatory morning briefing sessions of all professions on the pediatric unit. The success of this practice initiated hospital-wide adoption. On-the-fly simulations allowed staff to practice communication skills. It is Scotten’s philosophy that enduring positive behaviors must be emphasized repetitively in training; in her current educational position she aims to help graduate physicians with strong skills in communication and professionalism. She also learned through her early years of medical education the importance of peer-directed teaching and feedback.
The final area of intense interest throughout Scotten’s career has been telemedicine. This interest started in 2007 with the use of telemonitors for pulmonary function in children with cystic fibrosis. She was an early adopter of the field of telehealth before the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic forced patients and healthcare workers to see the true benefits of this modality.
As the director of Medical Simulation at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine, Scotten’s mandate is to initiate a new way of educating, which she refers to as teleteaching. By the first week of April 2020, NYITCOM had implemented standardized patient encounters via Zoom, and the methods we initiated now represent the norm for most medical training facilities across the world in running Observed Clinical Simulated Encounters.
With the current uncertainty of our world, it remains critical to create, examine, and implement new systems of teaching that promote skills in good communication via distance learning.
Recent Projects and Research
- Phase III, modified double-blind, randomized, parallel-group, active-controlled, multi-center trial to evaluate the immunogenicity and describe the safety of XXX conjugate vaccine compared to a licensed quadrivalent XXX conjugate vaccine in healthy children 2 to 9 years of age in the United States.
- Immunogenicity and Safety Study of an Investigational XXX Vaccine Administered Concomitantly with Routine Pediatric Vaccines in Healthy Infants and Toddlers.
- Acceptance of a XXX Infant Formula.
- A Phase II, Double-Blind, Randomized, Multicenter Trial to Evaluate the Safety, Tolerability, and Immunogenicity of XXX in Healthy Infants.
Selected Publications and Presentations
- Telemedicine: Early adoption in the field of telemedicine and telemonitoring in the area of Cystic Fibrosis. These early projects led to large, ongoing grants through the Cysitic Fibrosis Foundation exploring the use of telemedicine and chronic disease and disease adherence.
- Scotten, M.S. Implementation of a Home Telemonitor Program for Pediatric Cystic Fibrosis Patients. In: Chernick V, ed. Pediatric Pulmonology. Wiley-Blackwell Supplement 33, 2010: 370.
- Scotten, M.S. "An Airwatch a Day Keeps the Doctor Away" Platform Presentation, American Telemedicine Association Fall Conference. Palm Springs, California, 2009.
- Scotten, M.S. "Birth of a Telemonitor Program for Cystic Fibrosis" Platform Presentation, American Telemedicine Association Conference. San Antonio, Texas, 2010.
- Lassen, S., Canter, K., Scotten, M.S. North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference, Description of a Teleconferencing Intervention for Children with Cystic Fibrosis. Atlanta, Georgia, October 2014.
- Adherence in Chronic Medical Disease: Grants and independent research in the field of pediatric Cystic Fibrosis initiated to identify and modify patterns of adherence in parents and children with Cystic Fibrosi. This area of interest for fifteen years, along with presentations and publications in the CF world resulted in a major interest in adherence and disease outcomes.
- Scotten, M.S. Adherence and Myers-Briggs Personality Type in Patients with Cystic Fibrosis. In: Chernick V, ed. Pediatric Pulmonology. Wiley-Blackwell Supplement 33, 2010: 444.
- Lassen, S.; Scotten, M.S.; Miller, V. Adolescent Readiness to Transition to Adult CF Care: Adolescent and Parent Perceptions and the Role of Disease Severity. In: Chernick V, ed. Pediatric Pulmonology. Wiley-Blackwell Supplement 33, 2010: 451.
- Scotten, M.S. "An Examination of Adherence to the Inpatient Treatment program in a group of patients Hospitalized for Cystic Fibrosis Exacerbate" Child Health Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, 2007.
- Scotten, M.S. "Approaches to Maintain Patient Care of the Hospitalized Cystic Fibrosis Patient Through Tele-monitoring" Platform Presentation, American Telemedicine Association Meeting. Tampa, Florida 2011.
- Scotten, M.S., Campbell, K. "Utility of Ongoing Home Telemonitor use with Pediatric Patients" American Telemedicine Conference, San Jose, California, 2012.
- Medical Education: Introducing technology with improvements in the learning process while maintaining a student center approach and early introduction of both interprofessional simulation experiences and communication education.
- Scotten, M.S. Conventional Lectures vs Podcasts: COMSEP Meeting; Albuquerque, New Mexico.
- Scotten, M. S. "Introducing Multidisciplinary Communication Skills Via Simulation Scenarios" 11th Annual International Meeting on Simulation in Healthcare, New Orleans, Louisiana 2010.
- Scotten, M.S. Collaborating Across Borders- International Conference on Interprofessional Education and Training, Platform Presentation, No Bells, No Whistles—Just the Facts: Teaching Critical Communication Skills in an IPE Setting. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 2013.
- Scotten, M.S. COMSEP National Meeting, Student Utilization of Computer Order Entry. New Orleans, Louisiana, March 2015.
- Vukin, E.; Greenberg, R; Auerbach, M; Chang, L; Scotten, M.; Tenney-Soeiro, R; Trainor, J.; Dudas, R.; 2014. Use of simulation-based education: a national survey of pediatric clerkship directors. Academic Pediatrics; 14(4):369-74.
- Interprofessional Education: Work at the University of Kansas Medical Center initiated much of the current standards requiring integration of Interprofessional collaboration in accredited healthcare training institutions. Our work in both simulation and reaching across professional boundaries resulted in implementation of similar programs across the country and world-wide.
- Scotten, M.S. "Introducing Multidisciplinary Communication Skills Via Simulation Scenarios" Council of Medical Student Education in Pediatrics Annual Meeting, San Diego, California, March 3–7, 2011.
- Scotten, M.S. "Teaching Communication Skills Through Inter-Professional Simulation" Workshop, American Academy on Communication in Health Care Annual Meeting, Providence, Rhode Island, 2012.
- Scotten, M.S. "A Tale of Two Programs" Expert Panel (Requested by popular demand; a program that receives the highest ratings from the previous year's attendees is asked to repeat at the next year's conference). International Meeting on Simulation in Health Care, Orlando, Florida, 2013.
- Scotten, M.S. Collaborating Across Borders, International Conference on Interprofessional Education and Training Workshop. Tailor-made Teamwork Tools: Finding the Right Evaluation Tool for IPE Training. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 2013.
- Scotten, M.S. Collaborating Across Borders, International Conference on Interprofessional Education and Training. Platform Presentation, No Bells, No Whistles—Just the Facts: Teaching Critical Communication Skills in an IPE Setting. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, June 2013.
- The Interprofessional Collaborative Acute Care Practice – Pediatrics (ICAP-Peds): The ICAP-Peds grand introduced multiple modalities of education and training via an Interprofessional approach bridging proven communication education platforms via Team STEPPs to inpatient medical teams. It then provided those same healthcare workers with communication practice experiences via in-situ simulation and finally bridged the gap from hospitalization to discharge using telemedicine. This system led to utilization of the method from one unit at a large university hospital to a broad adoption throughout the institution.
- LaVerne Manos, E.; Johnston, K.; Scotten, M.; 2013. Board 205, Program Innovations Abstract Just-In-Time In-Situ Simulation – Beyond High Risk/Low Frequency Simulation (Submission #1401). Simulation in Healthcare: Journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare 01/2013; 8(6):464.
- Scotten, M.S.; Malicoat, A. Patient Education and Counseling Ref. accept. PEC-14-72R2, Minding the Gap: Interprofessional Communication during Inpatient and Post Discharge Chasm Care.
- Scotten, M.S. International meeting on Simulation in Healthcare, Just-in-Time In-Situ Simulation – Beyond High Risk/Low Frequency Simulation. San Francisco, California, January 27–28, 2014.
- Scotten, M.S. International Conference on Communication in Health Care, Minding the Gap: Inter-professional Communication during transitions in care. Montreal, Canada, October 2 2014.
Professional Honors and Awards
- Student Voice Pediatric Faculty Winner, University of Kansas Medical Center
- Pediatric Chair Award for Distinction in Scholarship, University of Kansas Medical Center
- Memberships: Fellow in the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association of Pediatrics, Society for Simulation in Health Care, Academy of Communication in Health Care, Arkansas Medical Society, American Medical Society Honors
Courses Taught at New York Tech
- DPR 1 and 2
- CBL