Abstract
Objective:To measure the content of oral outpatient case presentations and to assess the correlation of objective assessments of this content with subjective ratings provided by the clinic attending physician.
Design:Blinded assessment via audiotape of 36 oral case presentations of new patient evaluations by 23 medical residents.
Setting:Outpatient general medical clinic.
Participants:Duke University Medical Center medical residents during their outpatient rotation.
Measurements and main results:Important deficiencies were found in oral case presentation content. Specifically, psychosocial data were often missing (employment history was mentioned in 28% of presentations; illicit drug use, in 17%; household social structure, in 11%; sexual history, in 6%). An assessment and a plan were mentioned only 56% and 69% of the time, respectively. No correlation was seen between an objective “content score” and the attending physician’s subjective rating of the quality of the presentation (r=0.09).
Conclusions:1) The outpatient case presentation can be quantitatively assessed in a simple, straightforward manner; 2) outpatient case presentations have important deficiencies in content; and 3) preceptors’ evaluations of case presentations may be based upon factors other than content of the presentation.
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Received from the Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, and the Division of Biometry and Medical Informatics, Department of Community and Family Medicine, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina.
Dr. Kihm was supported in part by the Health and Human Services United States Public Health Service grant#5-D28-PE54006.
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Kihm, J.T., Brown, J.T., Divine, G.W. et al. Quantitative analysis of the outpatient oral case presentation. J Gen Intern Med 6, 233–236 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02598966
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02598966