TIRR Memorial Hermann Education Academy Celebrates 10th Anniversary

The TIRR Memorial Hermann Education Academy is celebrating its 10th anniversary, which provides an opportunity to reflect on achievements of the past decade and how the initiative is evolving in order to meet the challenges posed by technological advancements and changing health care professional needs.

The Education Academy was founded in 2015, with the goal of providing continuing education for rehabilitation medicine professionals in the United States and abroad. The breadth of educational offerings has increased significantly since the Academy was founded.

“The Education Academy is an umbrella term focused on educational programs on offer for physical and occupational therapists, nurses, social workers, case managers, psychologists and speech-language pathologists,” explains Patricia Tully, OTR, ATP, an education resource specialist at TIRR Memorial Hermann. “In addition, the Academy works with partners to provide continuing medical education (CME) for physicians.”

During its first year, the Academy hosted seven in-person courses, focused primarily on one- to two-day conferences. Currently, approximately 60 continuing education courses are offered each year via a variety of media, reaching more than 2,500 rehabilitation medicine professionals.

“One of the biggest changes in the Academy is how we’ve grown our formats,” notes Victoria M. Zegarrundo, PT, DPT, the director of clinical and professional development at TIRR Memorial Hermann. “While we began exclusively with in-person events, we now host live in-person, live virtual, hybrid and on-demand content as well.”

The change in content offerings began to better address emerging technology and individuals’ learning preferences, and was accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Zoom meetings and virtual learning became broadly accepted.

“COVID-19 made us pivot to providing these other forms of education, which have really flourished,” Dr. Zegarrundo says. “When everyone was looking at triaging what needed to be done in order to provide safe and effective patient care, it was decided that education was paramount and that we needed to move forward with providing and bettering our educational offerings,” Tully adds. “Our staff, the therapists, nurses and clinicians really banded together, and it gave us the opportunity to blossom.”

Increasing the availability of shorter virtual content also has nicely balanced the longer in-person conferences and allows the Academy to reach a broader base of health care professionals. “One of the visions we have for the Academy is to increase our on-demand content so that we can reach more clinicians, not just here at TIRR Memorial Hermann, but throughout the country and the world,” Dr. Zegarrundo says. “We are ensuring that people everywhere are able to receive the most up-to-date education regarding evidence based practice.”

“We are working hand in hand to observe what the research is telling us and then enact teaching programs to share that knowledge,” Dr. Zegarrundo notes. 

“In the past, we’ve had individuals come from a number of countries—such as Australia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Japan—in order to observe our health system and clinicians, so we are shaping an academic program where people can visit for a specific period of time and focus on achieving explicit learnings during their stay,” Tully says.

Future programs will continue to dig into the wealth of knowledge contained at TIRR Memorial Hermann and will leverage the extensive relationships that experts at the organization have with nationally and internationally based clinicians to collaborate on educational offerings.

“Our goal is to create the best education possible, whether that is having our staff train and teach, or bringing in experts from around the world to teach us,” Tully notes. “We spend a lot of time mentoring and training our internal staff, so they are highlighted and their knowledge and skills are shared. And TIRR Memorial Hermann provides us with a lot of freedom to develop collaborative courses in partnership with individuals and institutions that are renowned for what they do; if we don’t have certain knowledge in-house, we will bring it to the health system.”

Currently, offerings for 2025 include the 4th annual Cancer Rehabilitation Symposium: Advancing Patient Centered Care Across the Cancer Continuum, to be presented by TIRR Memorial Hermann and the MD Anderson Cancer Center on May 1-3, 2025, as well as a suite of virtual programs covering topics such as Advancing Clinical Practice in Brain Injury & Stroke Rehabilitation, Neuroplasticity for the Speech-Language Pathologist, and The Missing Factor of Quality Outcomes: Managing Nutrition Risk.