Impact of an Observation Medicine Educational Intervention on Residents’ Confidence, Knowledge, and Attitudes: A Quasi-Experimental Study

OBJECTIVES: Driven by innovations in healthcare, observation medicine (OM) is expanding as a medical specialty. Despite exponential growth, education on OM remains underemphasized in the internal medicine (IM) residency programs. We assessed the impact of an educational intervention pairing didactic and experiential learning with an interdepartmental approach on IM residents’ confidence, knowledge, and attitudes when providing observation care to patients with neuro-cardiovascular diseases in the hospital setting. METHODS: Our multifaceted intervention incorporated OM’s principles and practice in a flipped classroom with the team-, case-, lecture- and evidence-based learning model. Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model was used to assess the educational intervention’s effectiveness according to the first three levels, ie, reaction, learning, and behavior, using quantitative surveys. The surveys were completed pre-intervention, and immediately upon completion of the educational intervention. RESULTS: Of 55 eligible residents, 55 (100%) participated in this intervention. Fifty (90%) completed the pre-intervention survey, and 21 (38%) completed the immediate post-intervention survey. Kirkpatrick’s evaluation framework showed that the intervention had a positive impact on residents’ motivational reaction (attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction [ARCS], M = 3.8, SD = 0.87), their knowledge of common observation diagnoses (pre = 49%, post = 63%), particularly on cardiac diagnostic workup and approach to patients with transient neurological symptoms (P < .05), and their behavior and self-assessment of core competency domains (pre-mean = 2.69, post-mean = 3.18, P < .001). CONCLUSIONS: Our multimodal intervention provides a framework for a structured OM educational experience that can be incorporated into residency training, even without a formal observation unit rotation. The analysis also offers literary data on the current state of OM education in an IM residency program and supports the need to expand OM's educational resources to counteract the growth in hospital observation services. Future research should include an analysis of residents’ knowledge and skills from a longitudinal OM experience and advancing the results to residency programs where observation care is as applicable as ours.