I just finished a wonderful two days at the Academic
Internal Medicine Week meeting in New Orleans.
This is a meeting bringing together organizations involved in internal
medicine education and leadership, including, among others, the Clerkship
Directors in Internal Medicine, and the Association of Program Directors in
Internal Medicine. It is this latter
group to which I belong, and, as usual, this meeting did not disappoint. I was not able to attend the entire meeting,
but was present for the last two days. Here
are my brief thoughts on this meeting from those sessions I attended.
Direct observation has definitely come front and center as
an important component of training. Not
just an an assessment tool OF learning, but rather as assessment FOR
learning. It needs to be the culture
that we regularly observe trainees in their direct interaction with patients
(akin to playing the piano: my teacher was there right next to me the entire
time, giving constant feedback when I was doing something wrong or had held my
fingers in the incorrect position!).
I attended a session on a writer’s club to improve scholarly
output. This session really was riveting
for those who attended. Probably the best
discussion was on the fact that scholarly output does NOT have to be ONLY the
peer-reviewed publication (although that certainly is excellent!). Rather, we should consider other products
which still demonstrate a scholarly approach.
Those products might include writing a policy, disseminating a
curriculum, or creating a tool that others can use for evaluation
purposes. A phenomenal example of how to
consider this (focusing on the scholarship of education) is this toolbox from
the AAMC MedEdPortal on evaluating educators.
I also attended a great session by colleagues from the U of
Cincinnati and Nebraska on considering tools that we ALREADY use to report the
Next Accreditation System Milestones.
This session created my “A-HA” moment for how educators might
look at Milestones and Entrustable Professional Activities.
The next day, I was on the docket with others focusing on
innovation in resident ambulatory experiences.
I had the privilege of discussing our residency experience with teaching
quality improvement to trainees. Other
leaders discussed “X+Y scheduling”, to help improve resident interest in doing
primary care, ways to teach
Evidence-Based Medicine in the ambulatory arena, and experiences in residents
having a second continuity clinic with primary care physicians (known in their
program as “Second Site”).
In the final plenary, on one of my favorite topics,
utilizing emerging technology in medical education, four different programs
discussed their experiences with what they were able to accomplish. One was a current fellow who himself created
a smartphone app focusing on evidence-based management of patients
admitted/observed for chest pain. The
app link is found here (only available on iOS devices). Another speaker taught us basics of using Podcasting for
medical education, and two others demonstrated the use of iPads in medical
education and how others might consider using tablets for that purpose.
For anyone interested, the presentations mentioned above,
as well as all of the presentations that were loaded up, can be found here.
All in all, it was a phenomenal conference for me to
attend. Lots of great tweeting was done, as the conference encouraged the Twitter hashtag #AIMW13 for connections via
this microblogging social network. If you are interested, please see my tweets
from 10/5/13 and 10/6/13, which were mostly dedicated to the content of this
conference.
As a last note, I want to thank the incredibly
professional staff of AAIM for hosting a phenomenal meeting, and especially the
security staff of the Hilton Riverside in New Orleans Hotel for finding my
misplaced keys!
