Getting to Know You, Getting to Know All About You: Best Practices for Interviewing Fourth-Year Medical Students for Residency Programs

Posted on October 28, 2013 by | 1 comment
Kristine M. Diaz, PsyD

Kristine M. Diaz, PsyD

Thirty minutes. Thirty minutes to assess an applicant’s interpersonal and communication skills, emotional intelligence, reasons for applying to your residency program, determine if there are any red flags, talk about application materials (don’t forget to comment on that personal essay!), AND answer any questions the applicant has about your program. Oh, don’t forget to recruit for your program! Yeah. Thirty minutes. That’s all the time you get. Sounds, easy? Right?!

While many websites and online documents exist that address succeeding in residency interviews for applicants, there are no guidelines or best practices with conducting the residency interview for faculty members in residency programs. The lack of guidance in conducting the interview may lead to variability in the assessment of the applicant. This variability may also lead to a poor experience for the interviewee. How does one judge the fit of an applicant in a short amount of time?

Medical schools have developed varied approaches to the interviewing process for entry to medical school. Yet, residency programs appear to vary in their approaches to the selection process, particularly the on-site interview. A systemic and individual-based program approach may be considered in the interviewing process of applicants, using ACGME milestones and the interview itself as an opportunity to evaluate your program’s success in the development of a distinct health care professional in the competitive field of medicine.

Focus on these four areas to strengthen your residency’s interview process.

The mission, values, and goals of your residency program

Time should be spent as an entire faculty, discussing the mission, values, and goals of your residency program. ACGME accreditation standards provide a common foundation for all residencies to function and operate in the development of residents in training. However, your faculty and the program’s composition of residents and staff provide an opportunity to create its own identity as a program separating the lion from the crowd. Your identity as a program will help to generate a rubric to which you have made your selections for on-site applicant interviews.

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Posted in Education, Match, Residency

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Are We Teaching Template-Based Medicine? The Forest and the (Very Well Documented!) Trees

Posted on September 20, 2013 by | 12 comments
Bill Cayley, Jr

Bill Cayley, Jr,
MD MDiv

With the increasing use of electronic medical records (EMRs) and their ever-so-helpful templates, smart-sets, and forms for capturing information needed to support billing and guide protocols, I fear we are losing the narrative forest for the well-documented trees. Especially in family medicine, we have a long tradition of teaching our learners to appreciate narrative and nuance, and the flow of meaning and story that comes from a patient’s history can give far more insight into what may be going on than one gets from simple documentation of location, quality, quantity, etc. Now, however, our use of EMRs is pushing us more and more to documentation of positives and negatives, rather than story.

Case in point #1: As emergency room documentation has moved toward templates and away from dictation, I have found ER notes growing in length, yet declining in their ability to convey meaningful information. Documentation of an ER visit that in the past was captured by a one- or two-page dictated note, now comes in a eight- or nine-page template document that gives no real clue as to what really brought the patient in or what really happened.

Case in point #2: As EMRs use templates to guide information gathering, how often do you find yourself responding to the template in an office visit, or ordering something “because it is there,” rather than listening to the patient’s story? Continue reading →

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Posted in Education, Public Health

Crowdsourcing Ideas About Open Innovation: How Can STFM Raise the Faculty Development Bar Even Higher?

Posted on September 16, 2013 by | 5 comments
Rick Bothelo, MD

Rick Botelho, MD

All five goals of STFM’s strategic plan address innovation directly or indirectly, to varying degrees. The STFM 2013 Annual Report documents remarkable progress in innovation. Yet, most STFM members have had little or no training in developing innovations during their formal education. Furthermore, STFM’s achievements were made without developing any formal governance policies on open innovation.

Propose Faculty Development Programs on Innovation
Innovation and leadership development are complementary and separate skill sets. We need faculty development programs for both skills sets, so that we can create an academic home to accelerate our organizational development.1 STFM needs a formalized and structured faculty development process to enhance our capabilities and capacities to develop innovations that build on our significant achievements. What if STFM considered the need for faculty development programs on open innovation to be as important as leadership development?

Foster Open Innovation
Translating this business concept to health care, open innovation involves:

  • Creating new processes, methods, programs, services and products through the collaborative and boundary-less exchange of ideas, between silos within and across organizations, communities, networks and systems2,3
  • Enhancing free-flowing dialogues, inclusive participation and transparent accountability in ways that cultivate bottom-up, horizontal and top-down organizational synergies4,5
  • Coordinating a pro-active, comprehensive and ongoing change management process to foster a membership-wide process of creating leadership, administrative, educational, research, and clinical innovations, such as catalytic innovations.

Create Catalytic Innovations Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in Faculty Development Collaborative, STFM News