Our selection as one of only 21 programs in the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s (ACGME) Educational Innovations Project led us to six evidence-based approaches to learning and care:

• Patient-Centeredness
• Teamwork
• Evidenced-Based Learning Strategies
• Growth Mindset
• Improvement Science
• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice

These are more than just words to us. Over the past decade and half our residency program has been a learning laboratory putting ideas into action.

Have you ever felt you couldn't address your patient's concerns because you were rushing around so much? The average intern in the United States spends only 12% of their time in direct patient care. How can this be?

Our patient-centered bedside rounds focuses the care system around the patient, not the computer. You will learn how to help patients leave the wards with a sense of self-efficacy. Do they know enough to go home? Can they take care of themselves? If, not, how can we assist them?

In the clinic, our award-winning  Ambulatory Long Block provides an authentic primary care experience and the kind of real-life continuity needed to manage patients with complex problems. We see ourselves as teachers of the patients. What good is a treatment plan if the patient doesn't understand it? We close the loop of knowledge by providing clear written instructions from the  electronic medical record and by having the patients “teach-back” the plan to us to ensure they understand it.

Relationships are your most important therapeutic tools. We have designed care systems to allow these to blossom.

We are a team on the wards, in the clinic, and in the classroom.

Patient-centered rounds puts patients at the center of an interprofessional team that includes you, faculty members, students, and many excellent non-physician colleagues (nurses, case managers, social workers, therapists, educators). When we round together we introduce ourselves and our roles to the patients. We say: ‘the reason there are so many people in the room today is because we will all be taking care of you.’

During the Ambulatory Long Block you and your peers will form a large group practice. You will learn how to manage individual patients and whole populations together. The amazing (and award winning!) nurses, social workers, administrators, pharmacists, mental health specialists, surgeons, and sports medicine physicians you work with will help you deliver superior care in our safety net practice.

We also work together in the classroom. During Academic Half Day you and your team will use the Growth Mindset and a shared sense of purpose to learn medicine. The goal is not to show what you know, but to find out what you don’t know, and fix it. Growing like this requires vulnerability, and good teamwork creates the psychological safety that allows this to happen.

Our residents also join teams outside of our residency, especially in the Medical Community Advocates for Representation, Equity and Social Justice (MedCARES)  Learning Pathway, as well as in our Finding Meaning in Medicine Group, and our Wellness and Resiliency initiatives.

As master educators we have studied evidence-based techniques for learning and we’ve become educational innovators.

We believe in Growth Mindset, and organize our learning experiences around these principles.

Our state-of-the-art Milestones Evaluation System provides you with thousands of data points about your performance, and our Coaching team helps you use this information to grow. At this point in your life most of your evaluations have probably represented risk (think about grades in your 3^rd year clerkship – what would happen if you weren’t above average?). In our residency we are not concerned with averages or ranking people. We ask: are you better tomorrow that you were yesterday?

When you come to our conferences you will not see dark rooms and PowerPoint. Instead, you will encounter active small-group learning exercises challenging you to think rather than just passively receive knowledge.

Each of these experiences has been carefully constructed using testing, spacing, interleaving, elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding. We've had terrific results using these concepts: our American Board of Internal Medicine pass rate for the 2016-19 is 99%.

If you’re thinking about becoming an educator yourself you might consider clicking on the links in the prior sentence to see what each of these things is about.  We geek out on this stuff (because it works!) and have used our growing expertise to create a Medical Education Pathway for residents, and a Medical Education Fellowship that occurs after residency for those who want to delve deeply into the science of learning. The graduates of these programs have become fabulous medical educators in our residency and around the country. We can help you become one too.

Recently I was fortunate to win the International Residency Educator of the Year Award, the Association of Program Directors Distinguished Medical Educator Award, the  A.B. Dolly Cohen Award for Teaching Excellence, the American College of Physician's Master Teacher Award, and the ACGME's Parker Palmer Courage to Teach Award. My Medicine-Pediatrics counterpart  Jennifer O'Toole has recently won the in  Society of Hospital Medicine's Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as the Emerging Leadership Award for an Individual from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Group on Women in Medicine and Science (GWIMS), Ben Kinnear, one of our associate program directors won a Macy Faculty Scholar award. Danielle Clark was awarded the Barondess Fellowship in the Clinical Transaction and Bi Awosika, one of our associate program directors recently won the National Minority Quality Forum 40 Under 40 Leaders in Health award.  Although these are individual awards, they really represent the work of our tremendous education team.

Our program and residents embrace challenges, welcome feedback, and view each other's successes as a source of inspiration and information. 

The Model for Improvement asks three questions:

1. What are we trying to improve? We are not afraid of this question, and we ask our residents to be vocal when things need improving. We always have multiple improvement projects going on at the same time, suggested and co-led by residents.
2. How do we know a change is an improvement? We’ve learned a great deal about measurement over the past decade. Our Education team has published a number of high quality medical education studies, and we’ve presented our ideas all over the world.
3. What change can we make the will result in an improvement? When you’re in the Ambulatory Long Block you will receive personalized data reports showing how well your patients are doing. It’s rare for residents to be assessed on the quality of care they deliver. The true value comes when you use improvement science to advance your performance. It’s not a test – it’s real life: your patient’s.

If you are particularly interested in improvement science you can join our Improvement Pathway.

We acknowledge our current societal structures marginalize many of our patients and healthcare providers through racism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ageism, ableism, classism, ethnocentrism, and religious oppression. All these structural discriminatory practices still exist in society, and we categorically reject all of them.

We strive to be a program that celebrates diversity of race, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, age, ability, class, religion, national origin, and lived experiences

We commit to ethical, equitable, and transparent recruitment practices, focus on representation, equity and social justice, and partner with amazing teams in the medical school and health system. 

We understand the difference between fitting in (acting how you think you should act) and belonging -- being who you truly are. We are looking for the true you.