Resident factors associated with American board of internal medicine certification exam failure.

Introduction: Performance on the certifying examinations such as the American Board of Internal Medicine Certification Exam (ABIM-CE) is of great interest to residents and their residency programs. Identification of factors associated with certification exam result may allow residency programs to recognize and intervene for residents at risk of failing. Despite this, residency programs have few evidence-based predictors of certification exam outcome.

Impact of Patient Portal Messaging Reminders with Self-Scheduling Option on Influenza Vaccination Rates: a Prospective, Randomized Trial.

Background: Patient portal messages have been used in a variety of ways to facilitate improved communication between provider and patient. These platforms have shown promise in many ways for improving various health outcomes and overall communication between patient and provider.

Objective: Assess the impact of automated portal reminder messages and self-scheduling options on increasing rates of annual influenza vaccination.

The impact of 2011 ACGME duty hour restrictions on internal medicine resident workload and education.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) implemented work hour restrictions for physicians in training in 2003 that were revised July 1, 2011. Current published data are insufficient to assess whether such work hour restrictions will have long-term impact on residents' education. We searched computer-generated reports of hospital in-patient census, continuity clinic census, in-training exam scores and first-year resident attendance at educational conferences for the academic years 2010-2011 (August 1, 2010-May 31, 2011) and 2011-2013 (August 1, 2011-May 31, 2013).

Resident and hospitalist perspectives on the "great teaching case": Correlation with actual patient assignment decisions.

Background: With the advent of limits to resident duty hours and the size of teaching services, many academic institutions have introduced nonteaching services, often triaging perceived better teaching cases to the resident services.

Objective: To compare resident versus faculty perceptions of ideal cases for teaching services and compare these perceptions with actual triage decisions made by faculty who assigned patients to either teaching or nonteaching services.

Design: Residents and hospitalist faculty were surveyed about their perceptions of ideal and actual teaching admissions, first with qualitative, open-ended questions and then with quantitative, specific questions generated from responses to the first survey.

Coccidioidomycosis in African Americans.

Coccidioidomycosis is caused by Coccidioides species, a fungus endemic to the desert regions of the southwestern United States, and is of particular concern for African Americans. We performed a PubMed search of the English-language medical literature on coccidioidomycosis in African Americans and summarized the pertinent literature. Search terms were coccidioidomycosis, Coccidioides, race, ethnicity, African, black, and Negro.

Lymphangioleiomyomatosis: a case report.

Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) is a rare disease of unknown cause that traditionally affects young women of reproductive age. It is characterized by a proliferation of atypical smooth muscle cells, preferentially along the bronchovascular structures, that causes progressive respiratory failure. LAM is almost universally fatal without a lung transplant, although new clinical trials are ongoing.