Med Palm

This past July, NYUSOM decreased the length of the Medicine clerkship from 10 to 8 weeks. This reduction raised concerns that a clerkship that has been academically very successful would lose some of its quality by decreased exposure time. Finding a method to assess the quality and breadth of the students’ experience seemed important. Previous experience with the use of PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) based application for Ambulatory Care set the stage for this new method of assessing to the clerkship’s educational effectiveness.

The application is based on the Internal Medicine clerkship Directors’ curriculum that outlines core competencies that should be achieved during the 8 weeks. Clearly, one cannot learn all of medicine in this time but we would hope that you will all get a good foundation in how to conduct a thorough history, perform a complete physical examination, present a patient to a group and prepare a patient write-up. In addition, you should acquire skills in diagnostic and therapeutic decision making, test interpretation, bioethics of care and when to pursue self-directed learning during the clerkship. You should also see aspects of health care related to prevention, geriatrics, nutrition, occupational and community health care and efforts to continuously improve medical care quality. In addition, you should see a wide range of different medical conditions during your clerkship.

Use of this application should help you define your educational goals and objectives and to determine whether you have been exposed to as many objectives as possible. It will provide us a means of comparing different sites and patient populations and it is hoped a means of obtaining feedback on the quality of each educational venue.

We are expecting that many of your educational experiences will be patient-based. Patient privacy issues lead us to request that you avoid patient identifiers beyond the last initial and 4 digits of their medical ID number. The idea is to tie a patient to one of the following teaching venues: attending rounds, firm chief rounds, core conferences, humanism in medicine rounds and self-directed reading. There is an opportunity for you to give an assessment of the educational quality of the bedside rounds where appropriate. Lectures, journal clubs and CPC’s would also be good to “capture” in the conference section of the application and you can “grade” the educational success of these experiences too. There will also be an opportunity to identify procedures you have either witnessed or performed personally.

This is a work in progress and your comments and ideas will help improve the program. We will also provide a variety of medical shareware applications selected to enhance the experience. We hope this will also enable you to give good feedback on the educational quality of each encounter.