Experiments in Continuity — Rethinking Residency Training in Ambulatory Care

Because of numerous criticisms of the content and structure of residency training, redesigning graduate medical education (GME) has become a high priority for the internal medicine community. From 2005 to 2007, the leadership of the internal medicine community, working under the auspices of the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine Education Redesign Task Force, developed six recommendations it will pursue to improve residency education: (1) focus education around a "core" of internal medicine, which provides the framework for both the structure and content of residents' educational experiences, (2) fully adopt competency-based evaluation and advancement, which will enhance training by focusing on individual learners' needs, (3) allow for increased, resident-centered education beyond the internal medicine core, because different types of practice require customized knowledge and skills, (4) improve ambulatory training by providing patient-centered longitudinal care that addresses the conflict between inpatient and outpatient responsibilities, (5) use new faculty models that emphasize the creation of a core faculty, and (6) align institutional and programmatic resources with the goals of redesign, balancing the clinical mission of the institution with the educational goals of residency training. Adoption of these recommendations will require significant efforts, including pilot projects, faculty development, changes in accreditation requirements, and modifications of GME funding systems. Opportunities are ample for individual programs to develop creative approaches based on the framework for educational redesign outlined in this article, and for these educational and clinical redesign initiatives to work hand-in-hand for the benefit of patients, faculty, trainees, and institutions.

Historical bias toward service-oriented inpatient graduate medical education experiences has hindered both resident education and care of patients in the ambulatory setting. Describe and evaluate a residency redesign intended to improve the ambulatory experience for residents and patients. Categorical Internal Medicine resident ambulatory practice at the University of Cincinnati Academic Health Center. We created a year-long continuous ambulatory group-practice experience separated from traditional inpatient responsibilities called the long block as an Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Educational Innovations Project. The practice adopted the Chronic Care Model and residents received extensive instruction in quality improvement and interprofessional teams. The long block was associated with significant increases in resident and patient satisfaction as well as improvement in multiple quality process and outcome measures. Continuity and no-show rates also improved. An ambulatory long block can be associated with improvements in resident and patient satisfaction, quality measures, and no-show rates. Future research should be done to determine effects of the long block on education and patient care in the long term, and elucidate which aspects of the long block most contribute to improvement.