Changing the Ambulatory Training Paradigm. Design and Implementation of an Outpatient Pulmonology Fellowship Curriculum

Rationale: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has mandated that pulmonary fellows practice evidence-based medicine “across multiple care settings.” Currently, most clinical fellowship training is inpatient based, suggesting that more robust fellowship training in outpatient pulmonology is needed. No standardized ambulatory pulmonary curriculum is currently available.Objectives: To design, implement and test the feasibility of a standardized, case-based outpatient curriculum implemented for pulmonary fellows at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.Methods: A list of 20 topics in ambulatory pulmonology was generated and was used to create a series of literature-based teaching scripts, which served as the foundation for twice-monthly small group teaching sessions. Before implementation, the fellows were asked to complete a survey regarding their impressions of their existing outpatient training and their competency in ambulatory patient care. Participants we...