Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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To accurately model residents' work hours and assess options to forthrightly meet Residency Review Committee-Internal Medicine (RRC-IM) requirements. ⋯ Our electronic model is sufficiently robust to accurately estimate work hours on multiple and varied rotations. This model clearly demonstrates that it is very difficult to meet the RRC-IM work-hours limitations under standard fourth-night-call schedules with only four days off per month. We are successfully using our model to test proposed alternative scenarios, to overcome faculty misconceptions about resident work-hours "solutions," and to make changes to our call schedules that both are realistic for residents to accomplish and truly diminish total resident work hours toward the requirements of the RRC-IM.