Measuring the Impact of an Interactive Communication Skills Curriculum on Internal Medicine Residents

Study Summary

This study seeks to assess whether a novel method of teaching communication skills is effective in improving the communication skills of internal medicine residents. Effective communication is widely accepted as an essential skill in both clinical practice and post-graduate training. While the body of research on effective communication is maturing, training that incorporates this new data lags behind. Methodological difficulties inherent to the study of communication training programs further complicates the effort to create effective, evidence-based training programs for the next generation of practitioners. Cleveland Clinic has taught its internally developed relationship-centered communication model, the R.E.D.E. Model, to over 7000 providers in less than 5 years. While teaching this course, common communication themes emerged as areas where providers often "get stuck". This proposal details a cluster randomized educational study of a novel communication training curriculum that addresses 3 of the common communication themes that emerged and how those themes occur in multiple, different communication challenges. The curriculum will be delivered to 2nd and 3rd year internal medicine residents over three, 1-hr long training sessions. The investigators' primary aim is to test whether residents trained to identify and communicate through these themes will receive better scores on communication from patients seen in their general internal medicine clinic. The investigators will also assess the effect of this training on patient compliance and on management of common chronic diseases such as hypertension, depression, and diabetes. Lastly, the investigators will measure the effect of the training course on resident self-perceived burnout and empathy.

Primary Outcome

The CAT is a fifteen item survey measuring physician communication as perceived by patients. Each item is rated from 1 "Poor" to 5 "Excellent". The first fourteen items measure specific aspects of communication, and the last item measures the quality of communication overall. Because surveys such as this are subject to a ceiling effect, scores were also analyzed as the percent of questions that received the maximum score - also known as a "top box" score.

Interventions

• OTHER Communication Skills Curriculum