Annenberg-Designed Communication Tool Being Used for Global Pediatric Health
Annenberg Hotkeys, the free, easy-to-use, interactive distance learning platform developed at the Annenberg School for Communication, is delivering results worldwide. Initially designed to train Penn Medicine students remotely during the first weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, it has since been widely used to train people in remote locations around the world, for whom travel to learning centers is difficult or impossible.
Most recently, Dr. Vanessa Denny, an attending physician in the division of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), used it in Kumasi, Ghana, to teach pediatric sepsis management — a critical aspect of recognizing and treating life-threatening infections in children.
Annenberg Hotkeys was designed by Annenberg’s Kyle Cassidy in collaboration with Dr. Elizabeth Sanseau at CHOP, and later substantially improved by Matt O’Donnell, Research Associate in the Communication Neuroscience Lab. It was adapted by Denny’s team and Cassidy for use in Ghana, by using context-specific videos featuring Ghanaian children to create an engaging and realistic simulation.
And the results were stunning: “Preliminary data from our research phase indicated a significant decrease in septic shock mortality following training with this tool,” said Denny.
“One of the remarkable things about Vanessa and Kyle’s work is that the implementation of the novel Annenberg Hotkeys educational innovation combined with remote debriefing of real life events resulted in 18 more children’s lives saved (estimated 540 quality of life-years) in the six month study period alone,” said Vinay Nadkarni, MD, Professor of Critical Care and Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.
“The platform’s low bandwidth requirements and user-friendly interface facilitated easy training for local healthcare providers,” Denny said. “We have now expanded the use of this novel, contextualized tool to various hospitals in Ghana and other sub-Saharan countries.”
