Residency Specialist Tracks

The categorical internal medicine residency offers a number of special tracks, including primary care, women's health, and an inpatient career as a hospitalist. These programs primarily differ from our traditional categorical program in the organization of elective time in the second and third years. Thus, they can be chosen prior to entering the residency or elected during the first residency year.

A Primary Care Track, Women's Health Track, Hospitalist Track, and Sabbath Observance Program for Jewish Residents are offered.

The Primary Care Track

The Primary Care Track is designed to increase the resident's experience in ambulatory care medicine by offering a wider variety of ambulatory training sites, greater continuity of care, and greater knowledge of behavioral science than are available in the traditional internal medicine residency program.

The core of the ambulatory care training experience occurs as continuity sessions in community-based ambulatory care sites with large proportions of patients enrolled in managed care.

Outreach programs of the Primary Care Track include community-based practice experience, care of the homebound elderly, and care of the homeless and impoverished in the community, as well as rural medicine electives. Primary Care Track residents are encouraged to participate in population-based research, and they are supported in these efforts by a research staff.

Hospitalist Track

The Hospitalist Track offers to individuals who plan a career as a general internist with focus on inpatient management for other primary care physicians, the opportunity in their second and third year to place additional emphasis on critical care inpatient consultation and management and inpatient care. The curriculum is developed with an advisor and is designed to provide more intensive preparation for the efficient care of hospitalized patients than does the usual curriculum. Didactic training emphasizes strategies for minimizing length of stay and cost of care while providing high quality care.

Sabbath Observance Program for Jewish Residents

The Western Pennsylvania Hospital has a Sabbath Observance Program for Jewish Residents that leaves Friday evening to Saturday evening free of call duty. While on a teaching service, residents are assigned one 12-hour call between Friday evening and Sunday evening. Residents in the Sabbath Observance Program for Jewish Residents will only be assigned the 12-hour shift from Saturday evening to Sunday morning or from Sunday morning to Sunday evening, not the shift from Friday evening to Saturday morning or from Saturday morning to Saturday evening.