COMBINED (CLINICAL + RESEARCH) ROTATION
CLINICAL ROTATION
HANDS ON CLINICAL EXPERIENCE includes both Inpatient experience and Clinic experience.
INPATIENT EXPERIENCE
Hospital rounds with the attending physician will depend on the size of the service and number of admitted patients at that time. A pre-rounding on patients may be required by most of the supervising physicians. After the round the attending physician may sit down and do a teaching session. They may also give you homework or topics to look up and then discuss that the following day. Students would also be expected to read upon their cases daily and discuss one on one with the supervising attending if needed. On an average each student may carry a few hospital patients every day. Some physicians may expose their students to electronic medical record (EMR) entry of notes and review of laboratory and radiology results as well. They will also be exposed and taught how to do referrals to consulting physicians, interact with residents, fellows and other attending physicians, nurses taking care of the patients according to the guidelines followed by United States Clinical Management of patients. Students may be asked to attend grand Rounds in the afternoon or may have a didactic session as well. Some didactic sessions may be hands-on experience classes teaching procedures which will be very useful to the medical students when they become residents in a residency program. The timing for the inpatient rotation would be told to you by the supervisor of your rotation and a maximum 4 to 5 students would be allotted for rounding on inpatients and they will carry a panel of their own individual patients. Patients are allotted to students so that the students can study those patients go through their charts, evaluate them, formulate a plan, write their notes in the electronic medical records (EMR) under the direction of supervising attending physician and relay the orders for the treatment. In internal medicine, majority of the patient topics like congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, chest pain, shortness of breath, CVAs, stroke, muscular disorders, pneumonia‘s, respiratory failure, acute, abdominal, pancreatitis, cellulitis, diabetes, and diabetes complications are seen. There is a wide variety of exposure of inpatient hospital experience that the students get while doing our rotations. ICU and CRITICAL CARE exposure is also given and especially respiratory failure patients and ventilator management along with fluid and electrolyte balance and acid base balance is also taught. At the end of the rotation, they come out strong in internal medicine and critical care issues because of this exposure. Students are also exposed to various procedures, like intravenous infusion therapies, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, blood collection, bone marrow procedure, interventional radiology involving hematology and oncology. This is one of the best exposures that the past medical students vouch for.
In addition during this rotation, you will learn history taking skills, physical examination skills, art of differential diagnoses, and ability to order tests and order the treatment. Students will also be taught to write notes in electronic medical records and will be directly responsible for the patient care. They will be taught bedside manners, they will experience faculty interaction with other consultants and interaction with other residents and fellows involved in the care of the patient. They will also learn and understand the cornerstone in medical practice and that is patient confidentiality and HIPAA compliance.
CLINICS EXPERIENCE
The students will attend the outpatient clinics of the attending physicians for a period of 3 to 4 hours either in the morning or in the afternoons seeing about 8 to 10 patients a day. They may be exposed to these clinics 1-3 times a week depending upon the attending physician and their interest. During the clinic hours they would be required to take a history and physical, do a clinical exam, assess the laboratory, radiology, and other investigative work up, arrive at the tentative diagnosis and differential diagnoses and formulate a plan of action under the guidance of attending physician.
Experience in both inpatient hospital experience, and the outpatient clinic experience is directly under the supervision of our Attending Physicians.
RESEARCH ROTATION
Clinical research often leads to the publication of abstracts, which are short summaries of the study’s findings. Abstracts are typically presented at scientific conferences, such as the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) or American College of Physicians (ACP) or American College of Cardiology (ACC) or published in medical journals. Abstracts are an important way to disseminate the results of clinical research to a wider audience, including other researchers, clinicians, and the general public. They provide a brief overview of the study design, methods, results, and conclusions, and can be a useful way to quickly identify studies that may be relevant to a particular topic or research question. Abstracts are typically written in a structured format, with specific sections for background, methods, results, and conclusions. They are often limited in length, ranging from a few hundred to a thousand words, depending on the requirements of the conference or journal. We have CLINICAL RESEARCH rotations: Duration – of 4 weeks Mentors – Under the guidance of University researchers who are Ph.D. or Faculty members. Our mentors are from prestigious university programs with residencies like University of Chicago, Northwestern Memorial Hospital Medical Center, Stanford University, Yale university and University of Oklahoma Medical center. A mentor as above is assigned to you. You will work with the mentor for about an hour a day or every other day via zoom or phone or email. Under their supervision and guidance, you will generate clinical topics for research analysis. The mentors will help and guide you to convert your analysis into abstracts or write ups which will then be submitted to scientific forums, societies and conferences as abstracts or for publications in journals. At the end of the month our students usually have 1-4 abstracts submitted/published. Their recommenders will also give them a letter of recommendation on their University Hospital letterheads along with their designations.
RESEARCH IS CONSIDERED VERY IMPORTANT BY PROGRAM DIRECTORS AND MARKEDLY INCREASES THE CHANCE TO SUCCESSFULLY GET INTO A RESIDENCY PROGRAM.