A Letter From Our Program Director
Since 1976, our Internal Medicine Residency Program has been training highly qualified and successful physicians, preparing them to excel in primary care, subspecialty fellowships, and as hospitalists. Our goal is simple: to provide the best clinical training in the most supportive environment possible. We strive to provide the perfect balance between independence and supervision as well as between education and workload. Our commitment to seeking and incorporating feedback from our residents as well as a continuous process of self-improvement has allowed us to build one of the top clinical Internal Medicine Residency programs in the country.
Our Internal Medicine Residency program is a highly competitive program containing 108 residents. As a tertiary, University-based Medical Center with 781 beds, UMass Memorial Medical Center is the largest safety net hospital in the state of Massachusetts. Our residents routinely manage a wide diversity of patients where over 20% are foreign born, and over 20% are living below the poverty line. The Medical Center averages around 45,000 admissions, 1.2 million outpatient visits, and over 100,000 ED visits annually. Our residents directly manage a wide diversity of complex medical conditions including liver, renal, and bone marrow/CAR T-cell transplant patients, advance heart failure including LVAD and TVAR patients, and MICU patients with some of the highest acuity in New England. Hence our residency training provides our residents the opportunity to manage some of the most complex patients in the Northeast with cutting edge medical technology. Our urban and community hospital rotations complement time at the University hospital by providing residents with additional patient populations as well as excellent educators across the spectrum of care. The resident ambulatory experience, which now includes our new on-campus outpatient VA clinic, is similarly diverse and allows our trainees to develop long term relationships with both patients and faculty.
Over the past few years, we have continued to grow and shape our program, with many of the changes suggested by the residents. In addition to starting our Primary Care Track 4 years ago, we have added a Medical Education Pathway and a Research Pathway. These are designed to provide individual mentoring and additional opportunities for residents interested in careers in Medical Education and Research respectively. We have reduced the intern cap to 8 patients, eliminated all 24-hour shifts, and worked with hospital administration to provide pharmacist, schedulers, and discharge planners to assist you and minimize scut work.
In the summer of 2022, we received approval by the ACGME to expand our program by a total of 20 residents which is a process we will be doing incrementally over the next 3 years by adding 5 additional categorical positions and 5 additional preliminary positions per year. With the program expansion, we provide coverage to our new state-of-the-art inpatient building, and starting July of 2024, change our rotation schedule from a 4+1 to a 3+2 schedule. The new 3+2 schedule will provide our residents with an average of 10 additional weeks per year of electives for rotations in outpatient specialty clinics, research, and other electives.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of our program, we will continue our efforts to be at the forefront of Internal Medicine training. Thank you for visiting our website. If you would like to become part of our residency family, and experience one of the most diverse, well-rounded, and clinically excellent residency programs, I encourage you to apply.
Sincerely,
