Abstract No. 461 Development of iShadow, an automated shadowing program to expose first year medical students to interventional radiology

Given the transition of interventional radiology from a fellowship to an integrated residency, increased exposure for medical students to the field is necessary. Running a shadowing program, however, can be time consuming and requires some resources. We developed and preliminarily evaluated the use of an automated email script built into google documents to determine whether it could allow for efficient and increased exposure of first year medical students to interventional radiology. An automated shadowing program was developed within google documents using a custom send reminder service. Students signed up for slots onto a portal google document. They automatically received arriving instructions, as well as a pre- and postsurvey, the day before and after the rotation respectively. Faculty and staff were copied onto the service emails to be aware of the student coming with the associated need for scrubs and point of service. Two months of data were analyzed. Within 1 week of utilization 36/48 (75% of available shadowing spots) were filled through the first semester. Of those that had shadowed during the first two weeks (7), students reported preshadowing, being familiar with IR 2/5, being interested in IR at 3/5, understanding the difference between IR and DR as well as about the integrated program 3/5, with 0 being an SIR member. After shadowing, students responded: being familiar with IR 4/5, being interested in IR 4/5, difference between IR and DR 4/5, and still a 3/5 in hearing of the integrated IR residency program. By using the program, minimal extra staff time was required on a day to day basis to coordinate. We find that the use of the automated shadowing program enables higher exposure of medical students to interventional radiology with relatively little overhead.