Publications by authors named "Warren Wiechmann"

Article Synopsis
  • A significant number of consumers (48%) use generative AI for health inquiries, yet there is limited research on the quality of AI chatbot responses concerning emergency care advice.
  • This study evaluated responses from four popular AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Google Bard, Bing AI, and Claude AI) using 10 emergency care questions, grading them across eight performance domains.
  • Results showed that chatbots excelled in clarity and understandability (85%), had moderate accuracy and completeness (50%), but struggled with source relevance and reliability (10%), and potentially presented dangerous information in 5% to 35% of their responses.
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Objective: This study aimed to assess patients' interest in education content delivered through electronic modalities and identify trends in internet access and use among emergency department patients of various socioeconomic statuses.

Methods: A prospective, cross-sectional survey with 50 questions was completed by 241 English and Spanish-speaking patients in 2014 and repeated with 253 participants in 2019 at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center's Emergency Department (UCIMCED).

Results: Internet access increased from 83.

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Introduction: While females make up more than half of medical school matriculants, they only comprise about one third of emergency medicine (EM) residents. We examined EM residency cohorts with entering years of 2014-2017 to estimate the ratio of males to females among residents and program leadership to determine what correlation existed, if any, between program leadership and residency gender distributions.

Methods: We identified 171 accredited EM residency programs in the United States with resident cohorts entering between 2014-2017 with publicly available data that were included in the study.

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Background: Patient simulators are an increasingly important part of medical training. They have been shown to be effective in teaching procedural skills, medical knowledge, and clinical decision-making. Recently, virtual and augmented reality simulators are being produced, but there is no research on whether these more realistic experiences cause problematic and greater stress responses as compared to standard manikin simulators.

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Background: Gamification in medical education has gained popularity over the past several years. We describe a virtual escape box in emergency medicine clerkship didactics to teach chest pain and abdominal pain and compare this instructional method to a traditional flipped classroom format.

Methods: A virtual escape box was designed at our institution and incorporated into the mandatory two-week emergency medicine clerkship.

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Purpose: Technological advances are changing how students approach learning. The traditional note-taking methods of longhand writing have been supplemented and replaced by tablets, smartphones, and laptop note-taking. It has been theorized that writing notes by hand requires more complex cognitive processes and may lead to better retention.

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Introduction: Lectures are a standard aspect across all realms of medical education. Previous studies have shown that visual design of presentation slides can affect learner outcomes. The purpose of this study was to develop a slide design rubric grounded in evidence-based, multimedia principles to enable objective evaluation of slide design.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study examines why fewer females choose emergency medicine (EM) residencies despite more women in medical school, focusing on current residents' perceptions regarding gender influences in ranking programs and education.* -
  • A web-based survey was conducted, revealing that the personality of residents, location, and facility type were the most significant factors in creating rank lists, with gender-related factors also playing a critical role.* -
  • Female respondents placed greater importance on gender composition within residency programs than males, indicating that the presence of women among residents, leadership, and attending physicians heavily influenced their decisions.*
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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the importance of teaching medical students pandemic preparedness and COVID-19 related clinical knowledge. To fill the gap of COVID-19 instruction backed by evaluation data, we present a comprehensive COVID-19 pilot curriculum with multiple levels of evaluation data.

Methods: In the spring of 2020, the University of California, Irvine (UCI) School of Medicine piloted a two-week, primarily asynchronous COVID-19 elective course for medical students.

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Article Synopsis
  • The COVID-19 pandemic led residency programs in the U.S. to conduct virtual interviews for the 2020-2021 application season, increasing reliance on social media for communication and information sharing.
  • A survey of 465 applicants revealed that 53% followed residency accounts on social media, with 89% of them feeling influenced by that content when making decisions about their applications.
  • Most respondents rated social media's effectiveness for learning about programs positively and agreed that programs should continue using it in future cycles, suggesting it plays a crucial role in resident recruitment.
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Purpose: Medical schools must have clear policies and procedures for promotion and tenure (P&T) of faculty. Social media and digital scholarship (SMDS) is an emerging form of scholarship capable of reaching audiences quickly, conveniently, and in a wide variety of formats. It is unclear how frequently SMDS is considered during P&T reviews.

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Introduction: As part of its Next Accreditation System, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education and the American Board of Emergency Medicine describe 6 competencies containing 23 sub-competencies graded by milestones ranging from level 1 (expected of an incoming intern) to level 5 (demonstrates abilities of an attending) that are used to track resident training progression. To the best of our knowledge, there have been no studies introducing a milestones-based curriculum to medical students prior to their introduction to the wards, so we sought to determine the effects that a pre-clinical Emergency Medicine Interest Group (EMIG) Milestones Elective would have on preparing the students interested in Emergency Medicine (EM) as a specialty to meet the level 1 milestones prior to their intern year.

Methods: The elective hosted 15 events throughout the academic year, and pre- and post-curriculum surveys were administered.

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Introduction: When discharging a patient from the emergency department (ED), it is crucial to make sure that they understand their disposition and aftercare instructions. However, numerous factors make it difficult to ensure that patients understand their next steps. Our objective was to determine whether patient understanding of ED discharge and aftercare instructions could be improved through instructional videos in addition to standard written discharge instructions.

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As part of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requirements, residents must participate in structured didactic activities. Traditional didactics include lectures, grand rounds, simulations, case discussions, and other forms of in-person synchronous learning. The COVID-19 pandemic has made in-person activities less feasible, as many programs have been forced to transition to remote didactics.

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We introduced the AliveCor KardiaMobile electrocardiogram (ECG), a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved, iPad-enabled medical device, into the preclerkship curriculum to demonstrate the clinical relevance of cardiac electrophysiology with active learning. An evaluation showed that medical students considered the KardiaMobile ECG active learning activity to be a valuable educational tool for teaching cardiac physiology.

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Background: When being treated at a university-based hospital, a patient may encounter multiple levels of physicians, including trainees during a single emergency visit. Patients want to know the roles of their providers, but their understanding of the medical education hierarchy is poor.

Objectives: Our study explored patient understanding of commonly used physician and trainee titles as well as the factors that contribute to patient understanding in our emergency department patient population.

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Background: Medical student mistreatment has detrimental effects on student well-being and poses a patient safety risk, yet 40% of medical school graduates report being mistreated during their training. Unfortunately, this statistic has not changed significantly since 2013. The 'hidden curriculum' contributes to the pervasiveness of mistreatment in medical schools in the USA.

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Background: The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires that residency programs in emergency medicine plan at least 5 hours of didactic experiences per week. Instructional methods should include small-group techniques, problem-based learning, or computer-based instruction. Despite recommendations from the ACGME, many programs' conference didactics continue to include primarily lecture-based instruction.

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Background: The standardized letter of evaluation (SLOE) in emergency medicine (EM) is one of the most important items in a student's application to EM residency and replaces narrative letters of recommendation. The SLOE ranks students into quantile categories in comparison to their peers for overall performance during an EM clerkship and for their expected rank list position. Gender differences exist in several assessment methods in undergraduate and graduate medical education.

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Background: The standardized letter of evaluation (SLOE) was developed to make letters of recommendation in emergency medicine (EM) more objective and discerning. Typically, students obtain one SLOE from a home EM rotation and at least one more SLOE from an away clerkship. It is unclear if students perform better on their home or away EM rotations.

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Introduction: A cricothyroidotomy is an emergency procedure that few emergency medicine residents see or perform during their training. Therefore, there is a need for low cost, high fidelity models for training. In this study, we explore a new training model for cricothyroidotomies (the bleeding CRIC [cost-effective realistic interactive cricothyroidotomy]) to determine if this new task-trainer is non-inferior compared to the current standard of training.

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Residents commonly feel that a lack of time is a significant barrier in keeping up-to-date with both medical knowledge and literature. In this study, we addressed that barrier by placing an iPad-based live fact feed in the resident workroom of our emergency department, therefore allowing for passive learning while on shift. We hypothesized that residents with access to the live feed would score higher on monthly post-curriculum block exams.

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Introduction: A multiple-mini interview (MMI) is a type of structured interview, which may assess many non-cognitive domains in residency applicants. There are few studies on MMI during the emergency medicine (EM) residency admissions process in the United States. We sought to determine the strengths, weaknesses, and acceptability of a pilot MMI for EM residency admissions.

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