Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Open Access, Level-Specific, Core Content Curriculum for Emergency Medicine Residents

Background Leaders in graduate medical education must provide robust clinical and didactic experiences to prepare residents for independent practice. Programs traditionally create didactic experiences individually, requiring tremendous resources with variable content exposure and quality. Objective We sought to create and implement a free, open access, learner-centric, level-specific, emergency medicine (EM) residency curriculum. Methods We developed Foundations of Emergency Medicine (FoEM) Foundations I and II courses using Kern’s model of curriculum development. Fundamental topics were identified through content guidelines from the American Board of Emergency Medicine. We incorporated learner-centric strategies into 2 flipped classroom, case-based courses targeting postgraduate year (PGY) 1 and PGY-2 residents. The curriculum was made freely available online in 2016. Faculty and resident users were surveyed annually for feedback, which informed iterative refinement of the curriculum. Results Between 2016 and 2020, registration for FoEM expanded from 2 sites with 36 learners to 154 sites and 4453 learners. In 2019, 98 of 102 (96%) site leaders and 1618 of 2996 (54%) learners completed the evaluative survey. One hundred percent of responding leaders and 93% of learners were ‘‘satisfied’’ or ‘‘very satisfied’’ with FoEM content. Faculty and residents valued FoEM’s usability, large volume of content, quality, adaptability, organization, resident-faculty interaction, and resident-as-teacher opportunities. Challenges to implementation included resident attendance, conference structure, technology limitations, and faculty engagement. Conclusions We developed and implemented a learner-centric, level-specific, national EM curriculum that has been widely adopted in the United States.