Assessment of Inpatient Time Allocation Among First-Year Internal Medicine Residents Using Time-Motion Observations

Abstract

States spends more than $12 billion annually on graduate medical education. Understanding how residents balance patient care and educational activities may provide insights into how the modern physician workforce is being trained. OBJECTIVE To describe how first-year internal medicine residents (interns) allocate time while working on general medicine inpatient services. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Direct observational secondary analysis, including 6 US university-affiliated and community-based internal medicine programs in the mid-Atlantic region, of the Comparative Effectiveness of Models Optimizing Patient Safety and Resident Education (iCOMPARE) trial, a cluster-randomized trial comparing different duty-hour policies. A total of 194 weekday shifts were observed and time motion data were collected, sampled by daytime, nighttime, and call shifts in proportion to the distribution of

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