General Medicine Project List
Updated June 2014 by Daniel Z Fang MD and Wendy Caceres MD
Are you considering a career as a hospitalist or primary care physician?
Curious about general medicine research, quality improvement, or education?
Scroll through this list to see some of our many housestaff-friendly general medicine projects and get involved!
SPEAR (Stanford Physical Exam Assessment Research)
Development and implementation of a formalized physical exam assessment curriculum for internal medicine housestaff.
Contact: John Kugler, jkugler@stanford.edu
The Body as Text
A course with MS1 and MS2 students taught as an introduction to internal medicine. Lectures done as noon. Includes ultrasound techniques, simulation based medicine, international medicine, and physical exam skills.
Contact: John Kugler, jkugler@stanford.edu
Stanford Capstone Course
A 4th year elective clerkship to cement medical school skills and prepare for intern year. Includes topics such as skills lab, calling consults, ultrasound, placing intravenous lines, and airway management.
Contact: John Kugler, jkugler@stanford.edu ; Jeff Chi, jchi1@stanford.edu
Project TRANSFORM
Simulation based teamwork training focused on interprofessional education (physician-nurse, physician-pharmacy, nurse-respiratory therapy). Aimed to develop skills in practicing more effectively as a multidisciplinary team
Contact: John Kugler, jkugler@stanford.edu
Beside Ultrasound Videos
Looking for a resident or intern gifted in videography to assist in creating a bedside ultrasound curriculum
Contact: John Kugler, jkugler@stanford.edu
Digital Health Project
Studying the impact of a software tool (hotels.com like interface) to better help patients and family members select skilled nursing facilities and other post-acute care facilities. www.getrockfish.com
Contact: Charles Liao, cliao9@stanford.edu
Med-Ed/Curriculum Improvement Project
Creating and studying the impact of a blended curriculum for teaching learners how to work effectively with professional interpreters and how to interact with limited English proficient patients.
Contact: Charles Liao, cliao9@stanford.edu
The Stanford 25
Oversee, organize, and participate in biweekly physical exam sessions. Create, maintain, and oversee the main website (link), blog (link), youtube channel (link), and social media campaign. We are currently working on a number of research projects to evaluate the role this education has on learners and patients.
Contact: Errol Ozdalga, eozdalga@stanford.edu
Stanford Website & Education
The Dx website (link) was created in 2012 to be a resource to residents to aid with efficiency on wards and serve as a central location for multiple resources. Residents interested in the use of this website to promote education and/or patient care are open to create novel ideas that supplement or replace the current website. Of note, Stanford is changing the way websites are maintained and designed. This translates to minimal to no experience in building websites in the future and will provide an opportunity for creation of resources like Dx in a user-friendly environment.
Contact: Errol Ozdalga, eozdalga@stanford.edu
Stanford-Google Custom Search
Joint project with Google to customize Google search for healthcare providers (link)
Contact: Errol Ozdalga, eozdalga@stanford.edu
Narcotic Prescribing Guidelines
New evidence-based guidelines were recently implemented at the Stanford Internal Medicine and Family Medicine Clinics regarding narcotic prescribing for treatment of chronic non-cancer pain. We are currently studying how these guidelines have affected physician behavior and patient outcomes.
Contact: Jason Hom, homjason@gmail.com ; Nawal Atwan, natwan@stanford.edu
Stanford Healthcare Consulting Group
Each quarter the Stanford Healthcare Consulting Group, a student-run consulting group with ties to the business/medical/law school, focuses on better understanding and improving a hospital process. Recent examples include: barriers to discharge, telemetry use, laboratory over-utilization, and observation vs. inpatient status.
Contact: David Svec, dsvec@stanford.edu ; Lisa Shieh, lshieh@stanford.edu
Medicine Consult Rotation
Medicine Consult Rotation involves redesigning the curriculum, identifying and summarizing practice changing journal articles, and in the future, developing an online video series for perioperative medicine and common medicine consults.
Contact: David Svec, dsvec@stanford.edu
Improving Medication-Related Care During a Veterans' Inpatient Hospitalization
20-25% of patients discharged from the medicine service had discrepancies between their discharge medication instructions and the medications actually prescribed. In response, we have been working to integrate 5 new pharmacists onto the medicine teams. Ongoing work includes continuing to refine the workflow and tracking data. For the motivated resident, there may be opportunities to conduct a small study on the efficacy of bedside discharge medication teaching.
Contact: Elizabeth Le, elizabeth.le@va.gov
Improving identification and prevention of delirium during inpatient hospitalization
Currently we have working to find ways to improve both identification and prevention/treatment of in-hospital delirium. In addition to RN training, we have also launched a delirium order set. There is plenty of room for a research project, potentially looking at housestaff vs. nursing identification of delirium and efficacy of the order set in helping to reduce prevalence of delirium.
Contact: Elizabeth Le, elizabeth.le@va.gov
VA Multidisciplinary Conference
I help put together the multidisciplinary case conference series at the VA each Wednesday. For those interested in education and curriculum development, we are still in the early stages of defining what exactly encapsulates a good case and good presentation. There is certainly room to design a project to look at the attributes of successful and unsuccessful case conferences both from the learner/audiences perspective, but also from the moderators perspective
Contact: Elizabeth Le, elizabeth.le@va.gov
Advanced Clinical Skills
I'm currently the faculty lead of the Advanced Clinical Skills portion of the med school's Practice of Medicine course, which is specifically focused on teaching skills in the physical exam, oral presentations, and EKG interpretation to 2nd year students. We are often in need of energetic clinicians willing to spend an afternoon (Tuesdays and Thursdays) teaching these skills, and would be happy to have housestaff participation.
Contact: Eric Strong, estrong@stanford.edu
YouTube Medical Education
I have a YouTube channel which presents a variety of medical topics for students, housestaff, and other medical professionals. I'd be happy to discuss ways in which motivated housestaff could contribute to this ongoing project.
Contact: Eric Strong, estrong@stanford.edu
Medication Errors and Electronic Event Reporting System (ePER)
We have a robust event reporting system at the VA to report and track medical errors. A large subset of errors includes medication related errors and these are reviewed by the Medication Aggregate Committee on a monthly basis. We would welcome residents to observe this process and there may be great opportunities to participate in Root Cause Analysis events, create small studies focused on inpatient medication errors, or help educate colleagues regarding error reporting and patient safety.
Contact: Marianne Yeung, marianne.yeung@va.gov
Transparent Discharge Planning at the Palo Alto VA
We are continuously working to improve our discharge planning process from a multidisciplinary approach. Our goal is to create a transparent process to improve patient safety and coordinate effective and timely discharges from the hospital. As we move forward, we would welcome continued help from motivated residents to help better understand our barriers to discharge and what targets to focus on as well how to better foster communication with patients around discharge planning.
Contact: Marianne Yeung, marianne.yeung@va.gov
Lean Transformation at the Palo Alto VA
Using Lean Tools such as RPIW’s, Standard Work, DMS, tiered checking, and a continuous focus on quality we are working to improve the veteran and learner experience on the wards at the VA. Current projects include: Improving the transition from the ER to floor, Improved Medication Reconciliation, and redesigning the morning multidisciplinary meeting to result in more transparent and proactive discharge planning. Future projects will focus on developing more effective standard work around discharge planning to home and extended care, and developing a collaborative model of bedside rounding that involves a broader swath of the inpatient care team.
Septris: Sepsis meet Tetris
Project investigating the use of gamification to teach sepsis. Analyze how learners make clinical decisions under gaming simulating environment and improve Septris teaching tool.
Contact: Lisa Shieh, lshieh@stanford.edu
Inpatient Quality Improvement - Stanford
Contact: Lisa Shieh, lshieh@stanford.edu
Inpatient Quality Improvement - Palo Alto VA
Contact: Nazima Allaudeen, Nazima.Allaudeen@va.gov
Resident Clinic Improvement, Quality Improvement
Contact: Elizabeth Koehler, ekoehler@stanford.edu
Young Adolescents Transitions from Pediatric to Adult care.
Contact: Burak Alsan balsan@stanford.edu
Exercise interventions, depression management, preventative screening
Contact: Nawal Atwan natwan@stanford.edu
Unforeseen Drug Complications
Contact: Kevin Grimes kgrimes@stanford.edu
Geriatrics, Measures of illness severity, Poster case vignettes
Contact: Peter Pompei, pompei@stanford.edu
Mobile Health and Mobile Technology to improve health, Chronic disease self-management tools, wireless glucometer, pedometer in diabetes
Contact: Sandra Tsai sandra.tsai@stanford.edu
***Also venture beyond this list***
https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/
Design&Development By Stesha Doku