Background: Case-based scholarship and education are important and longstanding sources of knowledge about new diseases, rare presentations of known diseases, and side effects of treatments. Cases are commonly used to teach clinical decision-making and to tie together theoretical topics to real-life patient care. Hospital Medicine provides access to a myriad of clinical cases. However, sharing this knowledge is often hindered by a lack of experience, time, mentorship, or ability to identify noteworthy cases for presentation and publication. Previously, we did not have a standardized model in our section to collect cases from inpatient wards and store them in a systematic way for future dissemination.
Purpose: We developed a case repository to facilitate case-based scholarship through case reports and clinical vignettes as well as advance education through the use of cases in morning reports (MR) and clinical decision-making continuing medical education (CME) lectures.
Description: In conjunction with an effort to increase clinical vignette scholarship in 2021, a case repository was established to catalog eligible clinical cases in the section of Hospital Medicine. The availability of a case repository was publicized to the section and cases were collected from hospitalists through various channels including sign-out, direct email outreach, and workroom discussions. The cases were added to a secure shared patient list on the electronic health record. The cases were later reviewed by a team made up of 2 students, 1 resident, 1 NP, and 2 hospitalists. They documented each case’s general topic and diagnosis, a brief summary of the clinical course, any notable images, primary hospitalist, and potential presentation venue or scholarly output including clinical vignette, case conference, morning report, case report, podcast, instructional image, or other outlet based on chart review and the details of the case shared by the hospitalist. A second review by the senior hospitalists was done to confirm the appropriateness of the outlet. The repository was housed on a secure, web-based file storage platform compliant with the University of Chicago HIPAA security standards and maintained by the hospital medicine case-based scholarship team. Over the proceeding years, students, residents, fellows, and hospitalists were matched together to submit vignettes, produce case reports, and develop clinical talks, all based on their clinical interests and available cases. Cases were then marked as used in the repository and tracked for outcomes including abstract submission, acceptance, presentation, and publication where applicable. To date, the case repository has 53 submitted cases and has been used for 4 CME lectures on clinical decision-making, 1 resident-led morning report, 38 clinical vignette submissions, and 3 published case reports.
Conclusions: The creation of a case repository was highly effective in increasing the number of clinical vignettes presented in institutional conferences, national conferences, and medical journals, leading to educational and professional benefits for students, residents, fellows, and hospitalists. Next steps include broader development of case reports and other publication venues and improving use for additional educational talks. In addition, we will assess how the use of case-based scholarship can expand scholarly work as an entry point into scholarship.