Reforming Your Health Care Reform Curriculum

The landscape of health care is changing drastically, and the future within which our residents practice medicine will look very different than today's current health care system. Our residency program created a weeklong introduction to health care reform in the United States for residents.

The materials for faculty facilitators associated with this publication include PowerPoint presentations, a debate script on bundled payments, and an evaluation survey. The weeklong curriculum requires 7 hours of scheduled time from all learners, with an additional 5 hours for the residents and faculty running the debate. The survey completed at the end of the week showed that on a query of interest in health care reform (1 = no interest, 5 = very interested), interest level increased from an average score of 2.35 presession to an average score of 3.61 postsession.

Self-reported basic understanding of all areas queried increased from pre- to postsession.

This endeavor works best as a collaboration between residency program directors, associate program directors, residents, and other willing parties at one's home institution as the didactics were designed to include all PGY levels. Overall, this method of introducing a very complicated topic was well received by the residents, who voted to continue the weeklong curriculum going forward.