Background: Residents receive extensive medical training, but critical aspects of patient care associated with discharge, such as communication, escalation of care, discharge disposition, and safe transitions, are often inadequately covered. Memorial Hermann Hospital is one of four training sites for UT Houston Internal Medicine residents. To address the educational gaps around safe transitions of care, [...]

Background: Following the absorption of residents from a closing institution, our internal medicine residency became one of the largest in the country (~250 residents). Residents rotate every two weeks and attendings rotate weekly, with intentionally staggered start days to promote patient safety. This structure, however, leads to discontinuity in observation and feedback, often resulting in [...]

Background: Clinical reasoning errors are common, costly, and dangerous, yet difficult to study. Care transitions and the patient handoff offer opportunities to review and reassess care as well as provide valuable comparative feedback to clinicians. One educational area of improving clinical reasoning focuses on using multiple methods of feedback and reflection to learn from decisions [...]

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 [...]

Background: Firearm injury is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the U.S., yet research indicates that few clinicians receive formal training in promoting safe firearm storage, and both medical trainees and physicians report low knowledge and comfort about counseling patients. Medical education is an opportunity to address these barriers, yet in 2022, only [...]

Background: Inherent biases of healthcare professionals can result in interactions with colleagues that lead to workplace tension and hostile environments, due to a practice called othering. Othering is a frame that captures the many forms of prejudice and persistent marginality such as race, gender, sexuality, religion, income, and disability. In opposition to othering, belonging is [...]

Background: The opioid epidemic remains a critical public health challenge. In 2022, more than 82,000 opioid-related overdose deaths occurred in the U.S., largely driven by fentanyl (CDC, 2024). Although medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) are effective and evidence-based, only 21.5% of people with opioid use disorder (OUD) receive them (Dowell et al., 2024). A [...]

Background: Initiatives such as Resident-as-Teacher (RAT), Bite-Sized Teaching (BST), and gamification can improve resident teaching skills and encourage learner-centered education. However, their implementation is often limited by time constraints and lack of faculty expertise. Purpose: We developed and implemented the TEACH Tournament (Targeted Educational Approach to Clinical Highlights), a gamified, TED-style teaching competition to promote [...]

Background: Diagnostic reasoning is a core competency of medical training, yet opportunities for structured, hypothesis-driven clinical decision-making remain limited during clerkship years. This project expands an established mystery-case teaching series into a formalized curriculum that leverages large language models (LLMs) to enhance clinical reasoning among third-year medical students. Over the past five years, the weekly [...]

Background: Direct-care hospitalist teaching services (DCHTS), in which medical students rotate directly with hospital medicine faculty, have increased substantially. National data show that while only 9% of students rotated in this model in 2010 (1), by 2019, 45% of medical centers had adopted it, with another 25% considering implementation (2). These rotations emerged to address [...]