Curriculum Design

EM Fundamentals is a hybrid product of two medical education initiatives:


1. To create an asynchronous online curriculum for emergency medicine interns and
2. To provide transparency in the formal process of curriculum development

For the first initiative, the format of an online curriculum was chosen to facilitate a “flipped classroom” approach to weekly conference sessions. These sessions have also been re-designed in order to maximize face-to-face interaction between interns and faculty. The choice of content stems from a belief that interns in emergency medicine should be empowered with a fundamental knowledge of care for common true emergencies as a top priority. With this foundation, a secondary focus on approaching common chief complaints aims to improve interns' clinical focus and efficiency.

For the second initiative, we will chronicle the development of our curriculum under the six-step framework of Kern. This initiative acknowledges that formal medical education theory is currently under-represented in many available educational resources. As the world of FOAM continues to grow, we hope that a similar growth in awareness and use of formal educational techniques will help focus, refine, and legitimize these already impressive collections of content.