AMBULATORY CARE PRACTICE

I. HOSPITAL’S HEALTH CARE CLINICS

• Resident assumes primary responsibility for his or her own panel of 200-350 patients in the regular weekly ambulatory practice (one half day per week).
• Excellent teaching and supervision with a 1:4 attending to resident ratio
• Experiences include residents' primary care practices, subspecialty clinics and nursing home visits: - primary care and subspecialty services are delivered through the Ambulatory Care Center (ACC) at St. Vincent Charity Hospital and the Internal Medicine Health Care Center (IMHCC) at Saint Luke's Medical Center.

II. PRIVATE OFFICES

• A variety of ambulatory options available in each attending's private office providing experience in ‘how the successful do it!’
• Follow single attending physician through an entire month to grasp concepts of professional practice and time management
• Acclimatization to nursing homes and system based practice of medicine within the realms of such institutions.
• Use of information technology and available tools (including the internet) towards electronic medical record keeping, electronically generated new and refill prescriptions and the virtual script pad, just to name a few applications.
• Exposure to outpatient billing and coding procedures and guidelines. The residents in our program have the advantage of learning the appropriate documentation to help professional billing specialists’ code diagnosis appropriately. They also have the opportunity to learn from some of our experienced physicians who do their billing and coding themselves first hand.
• A broad based patient network including community health centers, urban and suburban settings and managed care settings depending on the locations of the physician offices
• We have designed ‘expectation forms’ for the residents to define and communicate their goals to the respective attending and help evaluate achievement at the end of the rotation.
• The ambulatory rotation attending devotes committed teaching time, both didactically and towards practical experience depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the resident.
• Sufficient exposure to different primary care tracks during residency help residents decide on choice of their practice proportions between outpatient and nursing home patients

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