Educational Experience - Internal Medicine Residency Program

Intern year can be hard—it’s hectic, and there is a huge amount of information to learn. Thankfully, we make it easier by protecting an afternoon every week dedicated to helping you build a strong foundation of knowledge. Components include:

• Core lectures on key subjects in the practice of medicine delivered by our subspecialist faculty
• Focused case-based learning to develop comfort in applying diagnostic and management strategies for common diagnoses
• Sessions with our clinical pharmacists and pharmacy residents, highlighting important topics the therapies we prescribe, such as antibiotic stewardship, anticoagulation management, or insulin therapy
• Lectures to help you navigate our hospital system and practice more effectively and efficiently, including blood bank, documentation, EPIC training, smoking cessation/case management resources, medical student teaching skills, and more

As advanced learners, residents should receive the advanced teaching they deserve. By protecting a weekly block for upper-level residents, we’re able to provide a diverse curriculum, including:

• Subspecialist lectures geared at high level topics, such as caring for transplant patients, advanced heart failure modalities, and stem cell therapy.
• Small group case-based learning to hone our clinical reasoning and management skills
• Resident-led teaching sessions on topics selected by the residents themselves
• Board preparation sessions, led by our academic hospitalists
• Diverse lectures on crucial “non-clinical” topics led by experts from Ochsner and beyond: quality improvement and patient safety, legal issues in medicine, information technology in clinical practice, medical student education, communication skills, and more

Outpatient medicine requires its own specialized knowledge base. Our ambulatory faculty have created dedicated morning sessions for our residents during their clinic weeks.

There’s no substitute for learning from the complex cases we care for every day. Having a structured forum to work through our residents’ most interesting cases helps hone the clinical thought process and bridges the gap between didactic learning and clinical experience.

Built into our subspecialty rotations are opportunities for didactic experiences that expose our residents to the finer points of each field. This includes our critical care curriculum, fellow lectures, tumor board, pathology and imaging review conferences, emergency medicine lectures, and more.

From presentations on active research to palliative care discussions to special guest lecturers speaking on a broad array of topics, our residents benefit from exposure to a variety of system-wide lectures and workshops on an ongoing basis.

Several evenings throughout the year we gather as a program to discuss the articles underlying the care we provide and research we conduct. In addition, we hold a debate using the available evidence to argue two sides of a pertinent medical question in the field highlighted in each session. All this, plus food and drinks!

We utilize our state of the art simulation center every ambulatory block to help you develop and hone the skills necessary for clinical success. This includes sessions focused on procedural skills, management of urgent and emergent patient situations, communication and difficult conversations, and ACLS training.

Led by our third-year residents, our monthly MM&I conference goes beyond the standard analysis of a single case with a poor outcome and dives deeper into the system issues and potential fixes lying at the root of the problem. The background work our residents are involved in often leads to important process changes and improved patient outcomes throughout Ochsner.

A companion to the traditional MM&I conference, the Amazing and Awesome (A&A) conference focuses on cases where positive outcomes occur despite high probability of adverse events. The conference involves taking a deep dive into the case with a multidisciplinary panel of experts to identify the individual behaviors and system processes that helped achieve the outcome to encourage personal growth and improvement in patient safety.