As we transition into the new academic year, rising senior residents and new attendings will face a difficult challenge: precepting a medical student or a new intern. Teaching in the Emergency Department is unique because it must be fast, efficient, and adaptable to the many different parts of our clinical practice. We are often trying to balance multiple patients in systems with numerous barriers, thus adding the responsibility of teaching can seem overwhelming.

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It is with great pleasure that announce our 2015-2016 ALiEM-AgileMD Design Fellows: Drs. Catherine Patocka and Jeremy Voros. It was a fierce competition with lots of qualified applicants with great ideas and visions, but Catherine and Jeremy stood out.

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It is with great pleasure that announce our 2015-2016 ALiEM Fellows for Social Media and Digital Scholarship: Dr. Alissa Mussell from West Virginia University Emergency Medicine Residency Program and Dr. Matthew Klein from Northwestern University Emergency Medicine Residency Program. That’s right, we selected two applicants! The competition was very strong, but we felt that our growth at ALiEM has been so tremendous since we launched in 2009, and most especially in the last year that we could foster the mentoring and development of both of these stellar candidates.

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One of my favorite images of medical education is the renowned Eakin’s painting, The Agnew Clinic. It depicts a gilded age operating theater filled with eager pupils looking on as Dr. Agnew prepares to preform a partial mastectomy. Despite being a cross-section of medical training from the late 1880s, any medical trainee today will experience an unspoken bond with those students dutifully taking notes in the tiers of Dr. Agnew’s operating theater. And there is a certain beauty to this lineage of physicians: all of us familiar with the same rite of passage into medicine but separated by a century’s worth of advances in science and society. (more…)

Everyone has a slightly different relationship with technology. For me, it has always been a tool for creativity. Whether working on video, music, or photography – I have spent more hours in front of a computer than I care to admit. I always dreamed about somehow using my experience with media development in a productive way for the medical field, but judging by the doctors who I knew in high school/college (including my parents),  my impression was that physicians and the world of the internet would remain forever apart.

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