Influencing residency choice and practice location through a longitudinal rural pipeline program.

Purpose: The University of Missouri School of Medicine developed the Rural Track Pipeline Program (MU-RTPP) to increase the supply and retention of rural physicians statewide. The MU-RTPP features a preadmissions program for rural students (Rural Scholars), a Summer Community Program for rising second-year students, a six-month Rural Track Clerkship (RTC) Program for third-year students, and a Rural Track Elective Program for fourth-year students. The purpose of this study is to report the specialty choices and first practice locations of Rural Scholars, RTC-only participants, and Rural Track Clerkship Plus (RTC+) participants (students who participated in the RTC Program plus an additional MU-RTPP component).

What criteria do faculty use when rating students as potential house officers?

Third-year medical students' grades are a combination of faculty observations, National Board of Medical Examiners examinations, and other departmental specific course requirements. Faculty evaluations include assessment of students' clinical skills, and a global rating for potential as house officer. We wished to better understand the 'potential as house officer' and to understand if these competencies were shared across the third year or unique to a given discipline.

The case for undergraduate medical education in healthcare business and management.

Current undergraduate medical education does notprepare students to approach the intricacies of healthcare business. This absence within medical education creates significant challenges for physicians throughout their careers. The field of academic medicine has clearly documented the need for medical education to prepare students for practice management, yet there exist only a small number of attempts at exposing students to healthcare business and management.

Evaluating the effectiveness of a Senior Mentor Program: the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine.

At the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine, we developed a voluntary senior-mentor program, the Senior Teacher Educator Partnership (STEP), for first- and second-year medical students. Using qualitative research methods, we examined the impact of STEP on medical students' attitudes and then assessed the congruence of what is learned through STEP with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to provide care to the elderly patient. STEP was found to be a successful strategy for teaching themes of recognizing the elderly within an ecological context, enhancing sympathy and empathy, emphasizing respect for elderly persons, and gaining an appreciation that aging is an individualized process.

Problem-based learning outcomes: ten years of experience at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine.

Purpose: To add to a previous publication from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine (UMCSOM) on students' improvement in United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 and Step 2 scores after the implementation of a problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum by studying the performance of ten PBL class cohorts at the UMCSOM.

Method: Characteristics of graduating classes matriculating in both traditional and PBL curricula, 1993-2006, were compared for Medical College Admission Test component scores, undergraduate grade point averages, performance on the USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 exams, faculty contact hours, and residency directors' evaluations of UMCSOM graduates' performance in the first year of residency.

Results: Mean scores of six of the ten comparisons for USMLE Step 1 and six of nine comparisons for USMLE Step 2 are significantly higher (p < .