Patient Workup in Time of Restricted Clinical Patient Contact

This project is designed for students to interact with real patients and for patients who are hospitalized, isolated and without visitors to have someone to speak with during their hospital stay. It is also an opportunity for the students to participate as part of the medical team and to advance their education based on real patients and real problems. Two students are assigned to each medical team. On the first morning of the week, each student is assigned a patient to interview by phone or by a virtual meeting. The student has full access to the electronic medical hospital records and will be expected to do a complete write up of the patient using the physical exam performed by the resident and the data from the admission. The H&P is to be submitted to the Clerkship Director and a teaching Internal Medicine resident for grading. The student will call the patient each day and write a daily patient note. The note is to be submitted on a confidential platform to the intern who may use the note as a template for their own note and who should provide some feedback. Each student is expected to serve as a research assistant to the team and look up two topics per week relevant to patient care for the residents. Mid-week there will be an online meeting with a retired attending and five students. Each student will have 10 minutes to give an oral presentation about their patient. They also will have five minutes to highlight a learning point and finally end with a relevant UWORLD question for their peers. There will also be a workshop on discharge summaries during the first week and the students will be expected to write discharge summaries for the patients that they follow. These also will be submitted to the Clerkship Director for feedback and to the intern on the confidential platform for potential use. Our goal is to have the students work up 6 patients in 4 weeks. Shelf exams are scheduled during 2 of the 4 weeks so there are not full weeks in our 4-week block. They will receive feedback on their written work and oral presentation.