Background: The personal statement (PS) is a crucial factor in a residency program’s evaluation of applicants and has traditionally been helpful in understanding applicants’ journeys in medicine, values, and written communication skills. Now, with accessible large language models (i.e. ChatGPT) designed for language composition, there is interest in how these models may be utilized by [...]

Background: Hospitalized medical patients transitioning to new house staff at the end of an inpatient resident rotation are associated with an increased risk of mortality as compared with patients not exposed to such handoffs, yet no data exist on improvement strategies targeting this transition. Given the frequency with which residents rotate service, a transition in [...]

Background: Opening new residency programs in community hospitals is one strategy to address physician shortage. Previous reports showed better outcomes in university based hospitals. However, less is known about teaching community hospitals. Disrupting well- established workflows in community hospitals is feared to cause an increased cost and possibly a slide in quality of care. Our [...]

Background: Communication breakdown plays a part in the majority of adverse events in healthcare. Physician to physician handoffs are particularly prone to communication errors, yet have been shown to be more complete when systematized according to a standardized bundle. However,  the degree to which individual elements of this bundle, including written versus verbal handoffs, contribute [...]

Engaging Residents in QI, the SMART way. Authors: Gabriella Sherman, MD and Luis Dimen, MD Background: Residency programs across the country have implemented various quality improvement (QI) lecture series in an effort to engage residents in QI projects.  Despite the many resources available to residents, they have limited time to utilize the tools to complete [...]

Background: Hospital Medicine has been the fastest-growing field of physician practice over the past two decades in the United States, and hospitalists practice in a variety of institutional and geographical settings. The role of the “academic hospitalist” has arisen in response to the needs of academic medical centers and their associated medical schools and Internal [...]

Background: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires residency programs to collect work hour data from trainees, with strict policies that no trainee should exceed an 80-hour work week (on average). Evaluating efforts to reduce work hours frequently relies on self-reported hours from trainees, which is subject to recall bias, inconsistency, and variable [...]

Background: The Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine and the American College of Physicians have acknowledged the importance of POCUS in internal medicine for diagnosis and procedural guidance and support its integration into graduate medical education. There are no current standards for the content or structure of a POCUS curriculum. As a result, institutions looking to [...]

Background: The Internal Medicine and Family Medicine residency programs were established at Hillsboro Medical Center (HMC), a small-sized community hospital, in 2021. As the multidisciplinary healthcare team adapts to incorporate resident trainees into the clinical workflow, the lack of resident exposure to Code Blue and rapid response scenarios was observed. Limited hands-on experience during medical [...]

Background: The United States is in the midst of a health quality crisis; for this to resolve, we must transform to a high-value, low-cost healthcare culture. To achieve such a culture, trainees must learn high-value care habits. We developed a 95-week longitudinal study to promote mindful laboratory habits in an internal medicine residency program. Purpose: [...]