Abstract Background Reducing costs and carbon footprint are important, parallel priorities for the U.S. healthcare system. Within surgery, reducing the number of instruments that are sterilized and disposable supplies that are used for each operation can help achieve both goals.

Students and residents aspiring for a career in academic surgery are looking for training programs that will help jumpstart their careers by exposing them to mentorship and opportunities to conduct research. While the gold standard of academic productivity (for the time being) remains peer-reviewed publications, conference posters and presentations are an important secondary metric.

I embarked on my year of academic development with the goal of making operating less painful for surgeons. The field of surgical ergonomics is nascent, and while there is an appetite for technological solutions, behavioral interventions are one of the only effective (albeit limited) tools available to us right now.

My prototype for a Residency Visual AbstractThis tool represents my own ideas and is not currently in use or endorsed by any institution. Medical students applying to residency often have to grapple with an incredible amount of information when evaluating prospective training programs. The increased number of applications and interviews inherent to the Zoom era further exacerbates this issue.

We asked GPT-4 to pretend that it was an academic surgeon and write an essay on the biggest challenges in academic surgery and how to solve them. Here is an unedited output of what GPT-4 wrote as well as the series of prompts we used to get this output.Disclaimer: AI large language models (LLM) can confidently state inaccurate information and make up facts.

AbstractThe field of surgery faces complex, systemic challenges that will require new academic frameworks. In this paper, we propose design thinking as a useful problem solving technique to apply to such challenges. We define design thinking and provide a brief history of this practice.

AbstractThe institutional knowledge required for residency is vast, complex, and frequently changing. Most institutions do not have a resource that serves as a singular source of truth for this information. Furthermore, since information is mostly presented on static documents such as emails or PDFs, there is no easy way to update and share the information in real time.

One of the most counter-intuitive principles when applying design thinking to healthcare and surgery specifically is the idea that quantity of ideas is initially more important than quality of ideas.

A digital reference guide to sutures and needles (adapted from Twitter Thread) As a student and junior resident, I didn’t understand how surgeons decided when to use each suture/needle. I tried to pick up on patterns but the info was never in one place.

Imagine that you want to read a paper. You probably either search the subject area of interest on PubMed or Google Scholar. Perhaps you were directed to the paper from an interesting Twitter thread or other social media site. Or maybe you were assigned the paper for a journal club or weekly educational activity. If you're trying to read the paper from within your institution's network, the process is usually seamless.