Background and objectives: Family medicine's professional organizations have reaffirmed the importance of practice management (PM), and three of the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education's (ACGME) six recommended core competencies include skills related to PM. In the process of integrating the appropriate ACGME competencies into our family medicine residency's PM curriculum, we conducted a systematic review of the literature regarding the implementation of outcomes-based teaching and assessment methods in other PM-related curricula.
Methods: We performed a systematic search of Medline/PubMed, supplemented by Web-published curricular resources, author contact, and bibliographic examination.
Results: We located 33 PM-related publications of varying depth and quality and divided them into three categories--those addressing traditional PM topics in a specific residency program (14 articles), those with aggregate data about multiple PM programs (10 articles), and those describing curricula targeting one or more of the three PM-related ACGME competencies (nine articles). Few studies address outcomes of curricular innovations.
Conclusions: There are few studies on the outcomes of PM-related curricula. Training programs that develop PM curricular materials should evaluate them and publish the results of those evaluations.