By Roby Hill
South Carolina College of Pharmacy
When Jacqui Pratt decided to enroll at the South Carolina College of Pharmacy, she didn't expect to see snow in April.

But then Katherine Schichtel asked her to participate in the Clarion 2011 Interprofessional Team Case Competition. And then the team of Schichtel and Hailey James, both students in health administration, Ted James in medicine and Pratt in pharmacy won the MUSC campus competition.

And then they were in Minneapolis for the national competition. In the snow.

Students Hailey James, from left, Ted James, Jacqui Pratt and Katherine Schichtel placed second in the national Clarion competition April 16 held in Minnesota.

Clarion or CLinician/Administrator Relationship Improvement OrganizatioN—is a University of Minnesota student organization created to improve health care through interprofessional collaboration.

"They asked me how cold it got in Charleston, and I said it got to about 20," said Pratt, a first-year student at the MUSC campus of the South Carolina College of Pharmacy. "They weren't impressed with our temperature range."

They were impressed with the MUSC team. On April 16, the team took second place and $5,000 in the Clarion competition. The team's faculty advisor was Del Schutte, M.D., although Dave Morrisette, Ph.D., accompanied the team to the national competition. A team from the University of Missouri won first place and $7,500; the third place finish went to a team from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.

Since 2005, Clarion has hosted a national competition with teams of four students in at least two disciplines presenting a root cause analysis in the context of real world standards of practice. MUSC has been participating since 2007, when a team from MUSC also placed second.

"We were supposed to act like a consulting team presenting to a board at a hospital and give them our recommendations on how to handle a specific case study," Pratt said.

All teams were given the case study in January. Eleven teams entered the preliminary competition at MUSC in March and judges selected the top three, which then competed for the chance to go to the national competition.

The competition was created in response to the Institute of Medicine report released in 1999 that indicated as many as 98,000 people in America may die each year due to medical errors. MUSC has been a leader in interprofessional initiatives and has its own interprofessional department, Creating Collaborative Care, which utilizes case studies and collaborative root cause analysis within classes and other campus activities.

"I was actually more nervous when we were competing at MUSC," said Pratt. "It was in a big auditorium with a lot more people. When we presented there, it was smaller and I didn't know anybody in the room, and we had done it so many times, we were pretty relaxed."

Based on an actual event, the case study involved two patient deaths related to a physician overprescribing narcotics. Pratt's team met regularly to discuss the case,