Feature
Discharge Lounges Done Right
(from the February 2021 ACP Hospitalist)
Discharge lounges have been used for decades at busy hospitals to alleviate overcrowding, offering a comfortable waiting area for patients who are ready for discharge but await transportation home and freeing up inpatient beds for those newly admitted or boarding in the ED.
I.M. Internal Medicine
Spotlight: Jillian Zavodnick, MD, FACP
Find out more about Dr. Zavodnick as an IM hospitalist and why she says there are no career planning mistakes.
ACP Council of Student Members (CSM) Spotlight
Lessons Learned Applying to Residencies
The year 2020 has been a watershed moment for all of us. As fourth-year medical students navigated their way through an unprecedented pandemic, they were also busy applying for residencies.
Medical Student Perspective
The Thing About Assumptions
I have two things I would like to admit: 1) I am prone to assumptions and 2) When I first heard that my patient's rare disease was primary hypersomnia disorder, I was almost disappointed.
Advocacy Update
Policy Paper Offers Guidance for Improving Diversity in Physician Education, Workforce
(from the February 5, 2021 ACP Advocate)
In the first of a series of policy papers, ACP suggests evidence-based solutions to eliminate barriers and inequities in education
Racism and discrimination remain common in American medicine, and the American College of Physicians believes it's time for a change. In a new policy paper, ACP offers guidance for creating a more diverse, equitable and inclusive physician workforce to better serve patients and for eliminating disparities at all levels of education to ensure patients achieve health literacy.
The ACP Advocate is a bi-weekly e-newsletter that provides ACP members with news about public policy issues affecting internal medicine and patient care.
Analyzing Annals
Time Out Before Talking: Communication as a Medical Procedure
This article explains how taking a medical history, delivering bad news, and discussing care goals might be improved by considering how clinicians prepare for invasive technical interventions.
Annals of Internal Medicine is the premier internal medicine academic journal published by the American College of Physicians (ACP). It is one of the most widely cited and influential specialty medical journals in the world.
Winning Abstracts
Late-Onset Systemic Lupus Erythematosus Presenting with Lupus Pneumonitis
Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) is a systemic autoimmune disease with significant clinical heterogeneity upon presentation. This poses a diagnostic challenge for physicians, especially when patients present later in life when diseases with overlapping features, such as malignancy, increase in prevalence.
Want to have your abstract featured here? ACP holds a National Abstracts Competition as part of the ACP Internal Medicine Meeting every year. Find out more at ACP Online.
Subspecialty Careers
Cardiovascular Disease
Cardiovascular disease (typically referred to as “cardiology”) focuses on prevention, diagnosis, and management of disorders of the cardiovascular system.
See all the career pathways open to internal medicine doctors.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a common and disabling illness that is often underdiagnosed and undertreated. Patients with GAD are at increased risk for suicide as well as cardiovascular-related events and death. Most patients can be diagnosed and managed by primary care physicians. Symptoms include chronic, pervasive anxiety and worry accompanied by nonspecific physical and psychological symptoms (restlessness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscle tension, or sleep disturbances). Effective treatments include psychotherapy (often cognitive behavioral therapy) and pharmacotherapy, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and serotonin–norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors.
Medical School Training Update
ECFMG Discontinues Step 2 Clinical Skills (CS) Exam
Following the May 2020 suspension of Step 2 CS due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ECFMG announced its intention to take 12-18 months to bring back a modified Step 2 CS exam that was appreciably better than the prior assessment. After reviewing current and anticipated progress with the exam and in consideration of the rapidly evolving medical education, practice and technology landscapes, they have decided to discontinue Step 2 CS. Read more.
Get Involved: Tell Your Pandemic Trainee Story
Deadline to Submit: March 19, 2021
The College will be holding a separate, virtual meeting for trainees on May 14 & 15 called the ACP Future IM Meeting. The event will feature a trainee story slam, for which we need 10 students and/or resident/fellows to speak on the theme: lessons learned from the pandemic as a trainee. Trainees must be ACP members, but they do not need to be registered or be “present” during the story slam on May 15. You need only submit your information and a URL to your 5-minute story to be considered. Selected stories will be edited together for the hour-long story slam. Submit your story.
Mountainlion IM Podcast Launches New Series
Looking for a new medical education podcast? Subscribe to Mountainlion, a podcast engineered, produced, and hosted by Paul Aronowitz, MD, from the University of California, Davis School of Medicine. He's started a new series, “Surviving Crisis.” Each episode explores experiences of survival, such as a doctor overcoming his own diagnosis of Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Listen.
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