'Walking together': How relationships shape physicians' clinical reasoning.

INTRODUCTION: The clinical reasoning literature has increasingly considered context as an important influence on physicians' thinking. Physicians' relationships with patients, and their ongoing efforts to maintain these relationships, are important influences on how clinical reasoning is contextualised. The authors sought to understand how physicians' relationships with patients shaped their clinical reasoning. METHODS: Drawing from constructivist grounded theory, the authors conducted semi-structured interviews with primary care physicians. Participants were asked to reflect on recent challenging clinical experiences, and probing questions were used to explore how participants attended to or leveraged relationships in conjunction with their clinical reasoning. Using constant comparison, three investigators coded transcripts, organising the data into codes and conceptual categories. The research team drew from these codes and categories to develop theory about the phenomenon of interest. RESULTS: The authors interviewed 15 primary care physicians with a range of experience in practice and identified patient agency as a central influence on participants' clinical reasoning. Participants drew from and managed relationships with patients while attending to patients' agency in three ways. First, participants described how contextualised illness constructions enabled them to individualise their approaches to diagnosis and management. Second, participants managed tensions between enacting their typical approaches to clinical problems and adapting their approaches to foster ongoing relationships with patients. Finally, participants attended to relationships with patients' caregivers, seeing these individuals' contributions as important influences on how their clinical reasoning could be enacted within patients' unique social contexts. CONCLUSION: Clinical reasoning is influenced in important ways by physicians' efforts to both draw from, and maintain, their relationships with patients and patients' caregivers. Such efforts create tensions between their professional standards of care and their orientations toward patient-centredness. These influences of relationships on physicians' clinical reasoning have important implications for training and clinical practice.

Interprofessional population health advocacy: Developing and implementing a panel management curriculum in five Veterans Administration primary care practices.

Health care systems expect primary care clinicians to manage panels of patients and improve population health, yet few have been trained to do so. An interprofessional panel management (PM) curriculum is one possible strategy to address this training gap and supply future primary care practices with clinicians and teams prepared to work together to improve the health of individual patients and populations. This paper describes a Veterans Administration (VA) sponsored multi-site interprofessional PM curriculum development effort. Five VA Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education collaborated to identify a common set of interprofessionally relevant desired learning outcomes (DLOs) for the PM and to develop assessment instruments for monitoring trainees' PM learning. Authors cataloged teaching and learning activities across sites. Results from pilot testing were systematically discussed leading to iterative revisions of curricular elements. Authors completed a retrospective self-assessment of curriculum implementation for the academic year 2015-16 using a 5-point scale: contemplation (score = 0), pilot (1), action (2), maintenance (3), and embedded (4). Implementation scores were analyzed using descriptive statistics. DLOs were organized into five categories (individual patients, populations, guidelines/measures, teamwork, and improvement) along with a developmental continuum and mapped to program competencies. Instruction and implementation varied across sites based on resources and priorities. Between 2015 and 2016, 159 trainees (internal medicine residents, nurse practitioner students and residents, pharmacy residents, and psychology post-doctoral fellows) participated in the PM curriculum. Curriculum implementation scores for guidelines/measures and improvement DLOs were similar for all trainees; scores for individual patients, populations, and teamwork DLOs were more advanced for nurse practitioner and physician trainees. In conclusion, collaboratively identified DLOs for PM guided development of assessment instruments and instructional approaches for panel management activities in interprofessional teams. This PM curriculum and associated tools provide resources for educators in other settings.

Interprofessional transformation of clinical education: The first six years of the Veterans Affairs Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education.

This paper describes the Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education (CoEPCE), a seven-site collaborative project funded by the Office of Academic Affiliations (OAA) within the Veterans Health Administration of the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). The CoEPCE was established to fulfill OAA's vision of large-scale transformation of the clinical learning environment within VA primary care settings. This was accomplished by funding new Centers within VA facilities to develop models of interprofessional education (IPE) to teach health professions trainees to deliver high quality interprofessional team-based primary care to Veterans. Using reports and data collected and maintained by the National Coordinating Center over the first six years of the project, we describe program inputs, the multicomponent intervention, activities undertaken to develop the intervention, and short-term outcomes. The findings have implications for lessons learned that can be considered by others seeking large-scale transformation of education within the clinical workplace and the development of interprofessional clinical learning environments. Within the VA, the CoEPCE has laid the foundation for IPE and collaborative practice, but much work remains to disseminate this work throughout the national VA system.

Warning bells: How clinicians leverage their discomfort to manage moments of uncertainty.

OBJECTIVES: It remains unclear how medical educators can more effectively bridge the gap between trainees' intolerance of uncertainty and the tolerance that experienced physicians demonstrate in practice. Exploring how experienced clinicians experience, appraise and respond to discomfort arising from uncertainty could provide new insights regarding the kinds of behaviours we are trying to help trainees achieve. METHODS: We used a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore how emergency medicine faculty experienced, managed and responded to discomfort in settings of uncertainty. Using a critical incident technique, we asked participants to describe case-based experiences of uncertainty immediately following a clinical shift. We used probing questions to explore cognitive, emotional and somatic manifestations of discomfort, how participants had appraised and responded to these cues, and how they had used available resources to act in these moments of uncertainty. Two investigators coded the data line by line using constant comparative analysis and organised transcripts into focused codes. The entire research team discussed relationships between codes and categories, and developed a conceptual framework that reflected the possible relationships between themes. RESULTS: Participants identified varying levels of discomfort in their case descriptions. They described multiple cues alerting them to problems that were evolving in unexpected ways or problems with aspects of management that were beyond their abilities. Discomfort served as a trigger for participants to monitor a situation with greater attention and to proceed more intentionally. It also served as a prompt for participants to think deliberately about the types of human and material resources they might call upon strategically to manage these uncertain situations. CONCLUSIONS: Discomfort served as a dynamic means to manage and respond to uncertainty. To be 'tolerant' of uncertainty thus requires clinicians to embrace discomfort as a powerful tool with which to grapple with the complex problems pervasive in clinical practice.

A view from the sender side of feedback: anticipated receptivity to clinical feedback when changing prior physicians' clinical decisions-a mixed methods study.

When physicians transition patients, the physician taking over may change the diagnosis. Such a change could serve as an important source of clinical feedback to the prior physician. However, this feedback may not transpire if the current physician doubts the prior physician's receptivity to the information. This study explored facilitators of and barriers to feedback communication in the context of patient care transitions using an exploratory sequential, qualitative to quantitative, mixed methods design. Twenty-two internal medicine residents and hospitalist physicians from two teaching hospitals were interviewed and data were analyzed thematically. A prominent theme was participants' reluctance to communicate diagnostic changes. Participants perceived case complexity and physical proximity to facilitate, and hierarchy, unfamiliarity with the prior physician, and lack of relationship to inhibit communication. In the subsequent quantitative portion of the study, forty-one hospitalists completed surveys resulting in 923 total survey responses. Multivariable analyses and a mixed-effects model were applied to survey data with anticipated receptivity as the outcome variable. In the mixed-effects model, four factors had significant positive associations with receivers' perceived receptivity: (1) feedback senders' time spent on teaching services (ß = 0.52, p = 0.02), (2) receivers' trustworthiness and clinical credibility (ß = 0.49, p < 0.001), (3) preference of both for shared work rooms (ß = 0.15, p = 0.006), and (4) receivers being peers (ß = 0.24, p < 0.001) or junior colleagues (ß = 0.39, p < 0.001). This study suggests that anticipated receptivity to feedback about changed clinical decisions affects clinical communication loops. Without trusting relationships and opportunities for low risk, casual conversations, hospitalists may avoid such conversations.

Chart stalking, list making, and physicians' efforts to track patients' outcomes after transitioning responsibility.

CONTEXT: Transitions of patient care responsibility occur frequently between physicians. Resultant discontinuities make it difficult for physicians to observe clinical outcomes. Little is known about what physicians do to overcome the practical challenges to learning these discontinuities create. This study explored physicians' activities in practice as they sought follow-up information about patients. METHODS: Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, semi-structured interviews with 18 internal medicine hospitalist and resident physicians at a single tertiary care academic medical center explored participants' strategies when deliberately conducting follow-up after they transitioned responsibility for patients to other physicians. Following open coding, the authors used activity theory (AT) to explore interactions among the social, cultural and material influences related to follow-up. RESULTS: The authors identified three themes related to follow-up: (i) keeping lists to track patients, (ii) learning to create tracking systems and (iii) conducting follow-up. Analysis of participants' follow-up processes as an activity system highlighted key tensions in the system and participants' work adaptations. Tension within functionality of electronic health records for keeping lists (tools) to find information about patients' outcomes (object) resulted in using paper lists as workarounds. Tension between paper lists (tools) and protecting patients' health information (rules) led to rule-breaking or abandoning activities of locating information. Finding time to conduct desired follow-up produced tension between this and other activity systems. CONCLUSION: In clinical environments characterised by discontinuity, lists of patients served as tools for guiding patient care follow-up. The authors offer four recommendations to address the tensions identified through AT: (i) optimise electronic health record tracking systems to eliminate the need for paper lists; (ii) support physicians' skill development in developing and maintaining tracking systems for follow-up; (iii) dedicate time in physicians' work schedules for conducting follow-up; and (iv) engage physicians and patients in determining guidelines for longitudinal tracking that optimise physicians' learning and respect patients' privacy.

Nurse Practitioner residents' perceptions of competency development during a year-long immersion in Veterans Affairs primary care.

BACKGROUND: Nurse Practitioner (NP) Postgraduate Residency programs are rapidly expanding. Currently, little is known about trainees' self-perceptions during these experiences. PURPOSE: Describe NP residents' perceptions of their strengths, areas for improvement, and goals while participating in the Veterans Affairs Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education NP Residency program. METHODS: NP residents responded to open-ended questions at three time points across their training year. Responses were analyzed using inductive and deductive approaches. FINDINGS: NP residents self-reported strengths in patient-centered care and interprofessional teamwork. They identified clinical skill acquisition as the major area for improvement. Their short- and long-term goals focused on personal and professional growth. DISCUSSION: These results suggest NPs prioritize clinical skill acquisition during a primary care residency. In contrast, leadership and performance improvement skills did not capture their attention. When aggregated at the programmatic level, assessments identified opportunities to improve the NP Residency program curriculum.

Veteran Affairs Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education: transforming nurse practitioner education.

To integrate health care professional learners into patient-centered primary care delivery models, the Department of Veterans Affairs has funded five Centers of Excellence in Primary Care Education (CoEPCEs). The main goal of the CoEPCEs is to develop and test innovative structural and curricular models that foster transformation of health care training from profession-specific "silos" to interprofessional, team-based educational and care delivery models in patient-centered primary care settings. CoEPCE implementation emphasizes four core curricular domains: shared decision making, sustained relationships, interprofessional collaboration, and performance improvement. The structural models allow interprofessional learners to have longitudinal learning experiences and sustained and continuous relationships with patients, faculty mentors, and peer learners. This article presents an overview of the innovative curricular models developed at each site, focusing on nurse practitioner (NP) education. Insights on transforming NP education in the practice setting and its impact on traditional NP educational models are offered. Preliminary outcomes and sustainment examples are also provided.

Having a Voice: Resident Perceptions of Supervision, Decision-Making and Patient Care Ownership.

OBJECTIVE: Heightened resident supervision due to patient safety concerns is increasingly common in pediatrics and may leave residents with fewer opportunities for independent decision-making, a diminished sense of autonomy, and decreased engagement. This may ultimately threaten their development into competent clinicians. Understanding how pediatric residents experience supervision's influence on their involvement in decision-making, engagement in patient care, and learning is crucial to safeguard their transition to independent practice. In relation to supervision, our research investigated: 1) how residents navigated their involvement with clinical decision-making and 2) how opportunities to make clinical decisions influenced their engagement in patient care and learning. METHODS: From 2019-2020, we recruited 38 pediatric residents from three different programs for a qualitative interview-based study. Through a constructivist stance, we explored clinical decision-making experiences and performed thematic analysis using an iterative and inductive process. RESULTS: We identified three themes: 1) Residents perceived having autonomy when they had space to make independent decisions, regardless of supervisor's presence; 2) Patient care ownership resulted from having a voice in a variety of contributions to patient care; and 3) Supervisors' behaviors modulated patient care ownership and thereby residents' sense of feeling heard, their engagement in patient care, and their learning. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that focusing on patient care ownership may better fit with current learning environments than aiming for independence and autonomy. They provide insight on how, in the pediatric learning climate of enhanced supervision, supervisors can preserve resident engagement in patient care and learning by augmenting patient care ownership and ensuring residents have a voice.

Transforming primary care training--patient-centered medical home entrustable professional activities for internal medicine residents.

INTRODUCTION: The U.S. faces a critical gap between residency training and clinical practice that affects the recruitment and preparation of internal medicine residents for primary care careers. The patient-centered medical home (PCMH) represents a new clinical microsystem that is being widely promoted and implemented to improve access, quality, and sustainability in primary care practice. AIM: We address two key questions regarding the training of internal medicine residents for practice in PCMHs. First, what are the educational implications of practice transformations to primary care home models? Second, what must we do differently to prepare internal medicine residents for their futures in PCMHs? PROGRAM DESCRIPTION: The 2011 Society of General Internal Medicine (SGIM) PCMH Education Summit established seven work groups to address the following topics: resident workplace competencies, teamwork, continuity of care, assessment, faculty development, 'medical home builder' tools, and policy. The output from the competency work group was foundational for the work of other groups. The work group considered several educational frameworks, including developmental milestones, competencies, and entrustable professional activities (EPAs). RESULTS: The competency work group defined 25 internal medicine resident PCMH EPAs. The 2011 National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) PCMH standards served as an organizing framework for EPAs. DISCUSSION: The list of PCMH EPAs has the potential to begin to transform the education of internal medicine residents for practice and leadership in the PCMH. It will guide curriculum development, learner assessment, and clinical practice redesign for academic health centers.

What Residents Want: Perceptions of Learning During a Pediatrics Night Float Rotation.

OBJECTIVE: Most efforts to improve the educational value of night shifts focus on delivering content through structured sessions. Less is known about aligning curricular efforts with inherent nighttime learning. This study explored interns' nighttime experiences to better understand how learning works for the purpose of designing a curriculum to best support interns' learning at night. METHODS: The authors employed a constructivist grounded theory approach. They conducted semistructured interviews with 12 Family Medicine and Pediatric interns recruited during their first-night float rotation at a tertiary care children's hospital between February 2020 and August 2021. Interviews elicited stories about nighttime experiences on the basis of a modified critical incident technique. Four authors used an inductive approach to data analysis and codebook development, then all authors participated in a thematic review. RESULTS: The authors identified distinctions between interns' perceptions of teaching and learning, with participants reporting rich instances of experiential learning at night. The authors discovered that interns do not want a didactic teaching curriculum at night. Rather, they want support to optimize workplace learning: the opportunity to independently initiate patient assessments, informal teaching arising from patient care, reassurance that support from supervisors is readily available, orientation to resources, and feedback. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest informal workplace learning is already occurring at night and historical attempts to implement formal curricula may have a low return on investment. A curricular frameshift is recommended to support learning at night that emphasizes informal teaching responsive to learning needs that arise from patient care, integrating but not emphasizing formal didactics when necessary.

Joy and challenges in improving chronic illness care: capturing daily experiences of academic primary care teams.

BACKGROUND: Two chronic care collaboratives (The National Collaborative and the California Collaborative) were convened to facilitate implementing the chronic care model (CCM) in academic medical centers and into post-graduate medical education. OBJECTIVE: We developed and implemented an electronic team survey (ETS) to elicit, in real-time, team member's experiences in caring for people with chronic illness and the effect of the Collaborative on teams and teamwork. DESIGN: The ETS is a qualitative survey based on Electronic Event Sampling Methodology. It is designed to collect meaningful information about daily experience and any event that might influence team members' daily work and subsequent outcomes. PARTICIPANTS: Forty-one residency programs from 37 teaching hospitals participated in the collaboratives and comprised faculty and resident physicians, nurses, and administrative staff. APPROACH: Each team member participating in the collaboratives received an e-mail with directions to complete the ETS for four weeks during 2006 (the National Collaborative) and 2007 (the California Collaborative). KEY RESULTS: At the team level, the response rate to the ETS was 87% with team members submitting 1,145 narrative entries. Six key themes emerged from the analysis, which were consistent across all sites. Among teams that achieved better clinical outcomes on Collaborative clinical indicators, an additional key theme emerged: professional work satisfaction, or "Joy in Work". In contrast, among teams that performed lower in collaborative measures, two key themes emerged that reflected the effect of providing care in difficult institutional environments-"lack of professional satisfaction" and awareness of "system failures". CONCLUSIONS: The ETS provided a unique perspective into team performance and the day-to-day challenges and opportunities in chronic illness care. Further research is needed to explore systematic approaches to integrating the results from this study into the design of improvement efforts for clinical teams.

Developing measures of educational change for academic health care teams implementing the chronic care model in teaching practices.

BACKGROUND: The Chronic Care Model (CCM) is a multidimensional framework designed to improve care for patients with chronic health conditions. The model strives for productive interactions between informed, activated patients and proactive practice teams, resulting in better clinical outcomes and greater satisfaction. While measures for improving care may be clear, measures of residents' competency to provide chronic care do not exist. This report describes the process used to develop educational measures and results from CCM settings that used them to monitor curricular innovations. SUBJECTS: Twenty-six academic health care teams participating in the national and California Academic Chronic Care Collaboratives. METHOD: Using successive discussion groups and surveys, participants engaged in an iterative process to identify desirable and feasible educational measures for curricula that addressed educational objectives linked to the CCM. The measures were designed to facilitate residency programs' abilities to address new accreditation requirements and tested with teams actively engaged in redesigning educational programs. ANALYSIS: Field notes from each discussion and lists from work groups were synthesized using the CCM framework. Descriptive statistics were used to report survey results and measurement performance. RESULTS: Work groups generated educational objectives and 17 associated measurements. Seventeen (65%) teams provided feasibility and desirability ratings for the 17 measures. Two process measures were selected for use by all teams. Teams reported variable success using the measures. Several teams reported use of additional measures, suggesting more extensive curricular change. CONCLUSION: Using an iterative process in collaboration with program participants, we successfully defined a set of feasible and desirable education measures for academic health care teams using the CCM. These were used variably to measure the results of curricular changes, while simultaneously addressing requirements for residency accreditation.

Assessing Chronic Illness Care Education (ACIC-E): a tool for tracking educational re-design for improving chronic care education.

BACKGROUND: Recent Breakthrough Series Collaboratives have focused on improving chronic illness care, but few have included academic practices, and none have specifically targeted residency education in parallel with improving clinical care. Tools are available for assessing progress with clinical improvements, but no similar instruments have been developed for monitoring educational improvements for chronic care education. AIM: To design a survey to assist teaching practices with identifying curricular gaps in chronic care education and monitor efforts to address those gaps. METHODS: During a national academic chronic care collaborative, we used an iterative method to develop and pilot test a survey instrument modeled after the Assessing Chronic Illness Care (ACIC). We implemented this instrument, the ACIC-Education, in a second collaborative and assessed the relationship of survey results with reported educational measures. PARTICIPANTS: A combined 57 self-selected teams from 37 teaching hospitals enrolled in one of two collaboratives. ANALYSIS: We used descriptive statistics to report mean ACIC-E scores and educational measurement results, and Pearson's test for correlation between the final ACIC-E score and reported educational measures. RESULTS: A total of 29 teams from the national collaborative and 15 teams from the second collaborative in California completed the final ACIC-E. The instrument measured progress on all sub-scales of the Chronic Care Model. Fourteen California teams (70%) reported using two to six education measures (mean 4.3). The relationship between the final survey results and the number of educational measures reported was weak (R(2) = 0.06, p = 0.376), but improved when a single outlier was removed (R(2) = 0.37, p = 0.022). CONCLUSIONS: The ACIC-E instrument proved feasible to complete. Participating teams, on average, recorded modest improvement in all areas measured by the instrument over the duration of the collaboratives. The relationship between the final ACIC-E score and the number of educational measures was weak. Further research on its utility and validity is required.

A multi-institutional quality improvement initiative to transform education for chronic illness care in resident continuity practices.

BACKGROUND: There is a gap between the need for patient-centered, evidence-based primary care for the large burden of chronic illness in the US, and the training of resident physicians to provide that care. OBJECTIVE: To improve training for residents who provide chronic illness care in teaching practice settings. DESIGN: US teaching hospitals were invited to participate in one of two 18-month Breakthrough Series Collaboratives-either a national Collaborative, or a subsequent California Collaborative-to implement the Chronic Care Model (CCM) and related curriculum changes in resident practices. Most practices focused on patients with diabetes mellitus. Educational redesign strategies with related performance measures were developed for curricular innovations anchored in the CCM. In addition, three clinical measures-HbA1c <7%, LDL <100 mg/dL, and blood pressure

Learning Challenges, Teaching Strategies, and Cognitive Load: Insights From the Experience of Seasoned Endoscopy Teachers.

PURPOSE: Learners of medical procedures must develop, refine, and apply schemas for both cognitive and psychomotor constructs, which may strain working memory capacity. Procedures with limitations in visual and tactile information may add risk of cognitive overload. The authors sought to elucidate how experienced procedural teachers perceived learners' challenges and their own teaching strategies in the exemplar setting of gastrointestinal endoscopy. METHOD: The authors interviewed 22 experienced endoscopy teachers in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands between May 2016 and March 2019 and performed thematic analysis using template analysis method. Interviews addressed learner challenges and teaching strategies from the teacher participants' perspectives. Cognitive load theory informed data interpretation and analysis. RESULTS: Participants described taking steps to "diagnose" trainee ability and identify struggling trainees. They described learning challenges related to trainees (performance over mastery goal orientation, low self-efficacy, lack of awareness), tasks (psychomotor challenges, mental model development, tactile understanding), teachers (teacher-trainee relationship, inadequate teaching, teaching variability), and settings (internal/external distractions, systems issues). Participants described employing strategies that could match intrinsic load to learners' levels (teaching along developmental continuum, motor instruction, technical assistance/takeover), minimize extraneous load (optimize environment, systems solutions, emotional support, define expectations), and optimize germane load (promote mastery, teach schemas, stop and focus). CONCLUSIONS: Participants provided insight into possible challenges while learning complex medical procedures with limitations in sensory channels, as well as teaching strategies that may address these challenges at individual and systems levels. Using cognitive load theory, the authors provide recommendations for procedural teachers.

"I Was Worried About the Patient, but I Wasn't Feeling Worried": How Physicians Judge Their Comfort in Settings of Uncertainty.

PURPOSE: Clinical educators often raise concerns that learners are not comfortable with uncertainty in clinical work, yet existing literature provides little insight into practicing clinicians' experiences of comfort when navigating the complex, ill-defined problems pervasive in practice. Exploring clinicians' comfort as they identify and manage uncertainty in practice could help us better support learners through their discomfort. METHOD: Between December 2018 and April 2019, the authors employed a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore experiences of uncertainty in emergency medicine faculty. The authors used a critical incident technique to elicit narratives about decision making immediately following participants' clinical shifts, exploring how they experienced uncertainty and made real-time judgments regarding their comfort to manage a given problem. Two investigators analyzed the transcripts, coding data line-by-line using constant comparative analysis to organize narratives into focused codes. These codes informed the development of conceptual categories that formed a framework for understanding comfort with uncertainty. RESULTS: Participants identified multiple forms of uncertainty, organized around their understanding of the problems they were facing and the potential actions they could take. When discussing their comfort in these situations, they described a fluid, actively negotiated state. This state was informed by their efforts to project forward and imagine how a problem might evolve, with boundary conditions signaling the borders of their expertise. It was also informed by ongoing monitoring activities pertaining to patients, their own metacognitions, and their environment. CONCLUSIONS: The authors' findings offer nuances to current notions of comfort with uncertainty. Uncertainty involved clinical, environmental, and social aspects, and comfort dynamically evolved through iterative cycles of forward planning and monitoring.

Exploring current physicians' failure to communicate clinical feedback back to transferring physicians after transitions of patient care responsibility: A mixed methods study.

INTRODUCTION: After patient care transitions occur, communication from the current physician back to the transferring physician may be an important source of clinical feedback for learning from outcomes of previous reasoning processes. Factors associated with this communication are not well understood. This study clarifies how often, and for what reasons, current physicians do or do not communicate back to transferring physicians about transitioned patients. METHODS: In 2018, 38 physicians at two academic teaching hospitals were interviewed about communication decisions regarding 618 transitioned patients. Researchers recorded quantitative and qualitative data in field notes, then coded communication rationales using directed content analysis. Descriptive statistics and mixed effects logistic regression analyses identified communication patterns and examined associations with communication for three conditions: When current physicians 1) changed transferring physicians' clinical decisions, 2) perceived transferring physicians' clinical uncertainty, and 3) perceived transferring physicians' request for communication. RESULTS: Communication occurred regarding 17% of transitioned patients. Transferring physicians initiated communication in 55% of these cases. Communication did not occur when current physicians 1) changed transferring physicians' clinical decisions (119 patients), 2) perceived transferring physicians' uncertainty (97 patients), and 3) perceived transferring physicians' request for communication (12 patients). Rationales for no communication included case contextual, structural, interpersonal, and cultural factors. Perceived uncertainty and request for communication were positively associated with communication (p < 0.001) while a changed clinical decision was not. DISCUSSION: Current physicians communicate infrequently with transferring physicians after assuming patient care responsibilities. Structural and interpersonal barriers to communication may be amenable to change. Clarity about transferring physicians' uncertainty and desire for communication back may improve clinical feedback communication.

Reflections From the Rearview Mirror: Internal Medicine Physicians' Reactions to Clinical Feedback After Transitions of Responsibility.

PURPOSE: Learning from practice is important for continuous improvement of practice. Yet little is known about how physicians assimilate clinical feedback and use it to refine their diagnostic approaches. This study described physicians' reactions to learning that their provisional diagnosis was either consistent or inconsistent with the subsequent diagnosis, identified emotional responses to those findings, and explored potential consequences for future practices. METHOD: In 2016-2017, 22 internal medicine hospitalist and resident physicians at Oregon Health & Science University completed semistructured interviews. Critical incident prompts elicited cases of patient care transitions before the diagnosis was known. Interview questions explored participants' subsequent follow-up. Matrix analysis of case elements, emotional reactions, and perceived practice changes was used to compare patterns of responses between cases of confirming versus disconfirming clinical feedback. RESULTS: Participants described 51 cases. When clinical feedback confirmed provisional diagnoses (17 cases), participants recalled positive emotions, judged their performance as sufficient, and generally reinforced current approaches. When clinical feedback was disconfirming (34 cases), participants' emotional reactions were mostly negative, frequently tempered with rationalizations, and often associated with perceptions of having made a mistake. Perceived changes in practice mostly involved nonspecific strategies such as "trusting my intuition" and "broadening the differential," although some described case-specific strategies that could be applied in similar contexts in the future. CONCLUSIONS: Internists' experiences with posttransition clinical feedback are emotionally charged. Internists' reflections on clinical feedback experiences suggest they are primed to adapt practices for the future, although the usefulness of those adaptations for improving practice is less clear.

Integrating systematic chronic care for diabetes into an academic general internal medicine resident-faculty practice.

BACKGROUND: The quality of care for diabetes continues to fall short of recommended guidelines and results. Models for improving the care of chronic illnesses advocate a multidisciplinary team approach. Yet little is known about the effectiveness of such models in an academic setting with a diverse patient population and resident physicians participating in clinical care. OBJECTIVE: To implement a chronic illness management (CIM) practice within an academic setting with part-time providers, and evaluate its impact on the completion of diabetes-specific care processes and on the achievement of recommended outcomes for patients with diabetes mellitus. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study SUBJECTS: Patients with the diagnosis of diabetes mellitus who receive their primary care in an academic general internal medicine resident-faculty practice. MEASUREMENTS: Process and outcomes measures in patients exposed to the CIM practice were compared with non-exposed patients receiving usual care. MAIN RESULTS: Five hundred and sixty-five patients met inclusion criteria. Patients in the CIM practice experienced a significant increase in completion of care processes compared to control patients for measurement of annual low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol (OR 3.1, 95% CI 1.7-5.7), urine microalbumin (OR 3.3, 95% CI 2.1-5.5), blood pressure (OR 1.8, 95% CI 1.1-2.8), retinal examination (OR 1.9, 95% CI 1.3-2.7), foot monofilament examination (OR 4.2, 95% CI 3.0-6.1) and administration of pneumococcal vaccination (OR 5.2, 95% CI 3.0-9.3). CIM-exposed patients were also more likely to achieve improvements in clinical outcomes of glycemic and blood pressure control reflected by hemoglobin A1c less than 7.0% (OR 1.7, 95% CI 1.02-3) and blood pressure less than 130/80 (OR 2.8, 95% CI 2.1-4.5) compared to controls. CONCLUSIONS: A systematic chronic care model can be successfully integrated into an academic general internal medicine practice and may result in improved processes of care and some clinical outcomes for diabetic patients. This study provides a model for further hypothesis generation and more rigorous testing of the quality benefits of structured chronic illness care in diverse outpatient practices.