Journal of general internal medicine
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Clinician educators-who work at the intersection of patient care and resident education-are well positioned to respond to calls for better, safer patient care and resident education. Explicit lessons that address implementing health care improvement and associated residency training came out of the Academic Chronic Care Collaboratives and include the importance of: (1) redesigning the clinical practice as a core component of the residency curriculum; (2) exploiting the efficiencies of the practice team; (3) replacing "faculty development" with "everyone's a learner;" (4) linking faculty across learning communities to build expertise; and (5) using rigorous methodology to design and evaluate interventions for practice redesign. There has been progress in addressing three thorny academic faculty issues-professional satisfaction, promotion and publication. ⋯ Clinician educators-particularly those in general internal medicine-bear the principal responsibility for both patient care and resident training in academic departments of internal medicine. The intersection of these activities presents a unique opportunity for their playing a central role in implementing health care improvement and associated residency training. However, this role in academic settings will require an unambiguous development strategy both for faculty and their institutions.
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While the Chronic Care Model (CCM) has been shown to improve the care of patients with chronic illnesses, primary care physicians have been unprepared in its use, and residencies have encountered challenges in introducing it into the academic environment. ⋯ Through a learning collaborative experience, residency programs can successfully incorporate chronic care training for residents while addressing gaps in care for patients with diabetes.
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Medical errors often occur when patients move between care settings. Physicians generally receive little formal education on improving patient care transitions. ⋯ TICC represents a feasible and effective program to teach evidence-based transitional care.
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To review the reported reliability (reproducibility, inter-examiner agreement) and validity (sensitivity, specificity and likelihood ratios) of respiratory physical examination (PE) signs, and suggest an approach to teaching these signs to medical students. ⋯ Possible flaws in study designs may have led to underestimates of the observed diagnostic accuracy of respiratory PE signs. The reported poor reliabilities may have been due to differences in the PE skills of the participating examiners, while the sensitivities may have been confounded by variations in the severity of the diseases of the participating patients. IMPLICATION FOR PRACTICE AND MEDICAL EDUCATION: Pending the results of properly controlled studies, the reported poor reliability and sensitivity of most respiratory PE signs do not necessarily detract from their clinical utility. Therefore, we believe that a meticulously performed respiratory PE, which aims to explore a diagnostic hypothesis, as opposed to a PE that aims to detect a disease in an asymptomatic person, remains a cornerstone of clinical practice. We propose teaching the respiratory PE signs according to their importance, beginning with signs of life-threatening conditions and those that have been reported to have a high specificity, and ending with signs that are "nice to know," but are no longer employed because of the availability of more easily performed tests.