Background: Academic hospitalists increasingly face tension between rising clinical demands and their responsibilities as educators. Traditional faculty development formats such as workshops or lectures can improve teaching effectiveness, but often require time and scheduling flexibility that many hospitalists lack, particularly early in their career. Asynchronous, microlearning approaches may provide an efficient, accessible alternative that supports self-directed and just-in-time learning.
Purpose: To design and pilot a concise, evidence-based educational newsletter to support hospitalist teaching efficiency and effectiveness during inpatient rounds.
Description: The Hospital Medicine Reengineering (HOMERuN) Research Network Medical Education Workgroup developed a quarterly “Educator’s Corner” which was distributed to academic hospitalists across the nation via the HOMERuN Newsletter listserv. Each issue featured one actionable, evidence-informed tip for efficient, high-impact teaching framed around a brief clinical vignette. Content was authored by a workgroup member and underwent an informal peer review process with the remaining workgroup members. Engagement was tracked via open rates, click-throughs to referenced articles, and a brief 5-star rating of perceived usefulness.Across two newsletter issues, distribution averaged 683 recipients, with an open rate of 45% (mean 307 opens). Of those who opened, 4.9% clicked through to referenced articles (n=18) and 18% rated usefulness on a 5-point scale (n=55.5). 45% of respondents rated the content a 4 or 5.
Conclusions: While still in the preliminary phase, our results demonstrate that a quarterly, asynchronous newsletter is a feasible, low-resource model for promoting microlearning among academic hospitalists. The average open rate of our newsletter is similar to published benchmarks for educational email campaigns, suggesting that this modality can capture attention even among clinicians with heavy clinical loads. There was a wide distribution for ratings about each tip suggesting a heterogeneous audience and more focused delivery of these tips to a selective audience may yield higher utility. Future iterations will incorporate user feedback, evaluate perceived impact on teaching behaviors, and explore scalability to other faculty development domains. Diversifying delivery methods including asynchronous and microlearning approaches may help institutions meet the varied learning preferences of their faculty while mitigating time and access barriers.