Inpatient US Clinical Experience in Internal Medicine/Hospital Medicine in Los Angeles

Information about this clinical experience:

You will be under the supervision of a physician who is board-certified in Internal Medicine. This physician has over 15 years of experience practicing hospital medicine. The preceptor holds hospital appointments at hospitals within the KPC Health System as well as several other hospitals in Orange County.

Your day will be spent providing team-based care to inpatients at several different hospitals. For patients that are assigned to you, you will be expected to follow these patients from admission to discharge. Your day will begin with prerounds at one hospital where you will gather information from multiple sources (chart, nurses, patient interviews) so that you can bring the team up to speed on changes in the patients’ conditions from the previous day.

After you gather this information, it will be important to set aside time to prepare your oral case presentations. These presentations will be delivered to the attending physician during attending rounds which immediately follow prerounds. The preceptor expects that students will acquire the ability to deliver concise SOAP-based patient presentations that include relevant details. The physician would like students to show their diagnostic reasoning especially when presenting the assessment and plan. A plan should always be proposed because the exercise of synthesizing the data to come up with a plan is an important part of your professional growth. Please note that this attending will ask you to develop and defend your plan as a way for you to grow as a learner.

During attending rounds, you will accompany the physician as the team sees patients on the service. For patients that you are following, you will be expected to deliver the oral case presentation and engage in the discussion that follows.

After attending rounds, it will be time to repeat this entire process at the next hospital. On average, you can expect to visit 2-3 hospitals per day.

During your experience, you will learn the following U.S. medical practices under the preceptor’s supervision (please note that this experience remains within the regulations of California pertaining to the unlicensed practice of medicine):

• Taking patient histories.

• Presenting patients.

• Researching the literature to answer clinical questions at the point of care.

• Educating patients.

• Delivering talks about important topics.

• Teaching other team members.