March Matchness: What HCA Healthcare Residency Programs Have to Offer

Residency. It’s exciting. It’s demanding. It’s eye opening. And after years of medical school, where textbooks and medical actors rule, it’s where newly minted doctors begin to treat real patients in a real-world environment. It’s Match Day.

I believe most residency programs in the United States expose their students to the real-world atmosphere. What makes HCA Healthcare’s graduate medical education program unique is our emphasis on the individual resident’s performance. We work on capabilities that a physician will face once he or she enters private practice, such as core measures and patient satisfaction. We give continuous feedback to our residents so they will understand where they excel, as well as where they can improve.

Our most fervent goal is to provide each individual resident with clear-cut data on their performance, in terms of how patient care is provided. Traditionally, residents are evaluated based on the professional judgment of the faculty that are supervising them. That’s subjective. With 170 hospitals across the county, HCA Healthcare has statistics and quality indicators like few other systems, giving us extra capabilities to provide an unbiased evaluation of resident performance.

In training our residents, we also put a heavy emphasis on communication between the physician and the patient. Often patients think the quality of care is higher when their doctors are clear in setting expectations and keeping them informed. We help our residents perfect that skill. We also spend a great deal of time talking about the business side of healthcare – electronic medical records, documentation, payers, and successful practice management. As a company, HCA Healthcare leads in all these areas, so we feel incredibly well prepared to teach others to be leaders in those realms. Having the ability to train in a hospital environment, that also emphasizes the business side of healthcare, gives the residents an advantage.

Another unique way we use our scale to help train our residents is our National Grand Rounds Program. This allows us to take a top speaker on any given topic and deliver his or her content on-demand to each one of our residents across the country. Then, the local faculty work with the residents to interpret what they’re hearing. As this program grows, we will transition much of our lecture content to this format, with our local faculty applying the lessons in a clinical context for the residents in their facilities.

With HCA Healthcare graduate medical education programs, residents can expect an accomplished, active faculty that gives individualized attention. We will tailor our teaching and our efforts to making our residents the best practitioners that they can become, no matter the specialty. Our scale nationally gives us innovative power in both the curricular and research world, while our scale on an individual facility basis allows us to be personalized and attentive.

Today, we hope medical students find themselves matched with a residency at HCA Healthcare. We look forward to welcoming them into the HCA Healthcare family. To learn more about our various programs across the nation, visit us here.

Bruce Deighton

Vice President, Graduate Medical Education