Acting Intern Hospitalist Rotation

Cory Ritter, MD

Excellence in medical student education is one of the core principles of the Division of Hospital Medicine. Changes in the structure of the internal medicine residency program and Northwestern University’s hospital affiliations have led to an increase in the number of fourth year medical students performing internal medicine subinternships relative to teaching teams. We took this opportunity to create a new model for the fourth year internal medicine sub-internship. These students now may elect to spend 2 of their 4 weeks with hospitalist attendings in an “Acting Internship (AI).”

Team Structure:

• Prefer for MS4 to request to be referred to as Acting Interns (AIs)
• AIs rotate on service for 2 weeks
• AIs off on Sundays
• Hospitalists with good teaching evaluations act as preceptors
• Hospitalists on service for 7 days (switch Mondays)

Patient Flow:

• No more than 4 patients at any one time for each AI
• Patients mostly localized
• Nightfloat pick ups avoided as much as possible
• AIs can admit any day
• Supervising hospitalists attempts to obtain patients appropriate for AIs from popol of ptients being admitted
• If the patients service overall is busy, the AI hospitalist may follow 1 or 2 low complexity patients on his or her own without AI coverage

Miscellaneous:

• Afternoon discussion topics with Hospitalist and AIs as appropriate
• Hospitalists are developing curriculum in collaboration with M4 Director
• Admission of nightfloats may become more common, but this will be based on volume of the service and abilities of the AIs

For more information regarding the AI Hospitalist Rotation, please contact Cory Ritter, MD.