A New Era of Board Exam Preparation Awaits and "The Pitt"

This episode explores the intersections of emergency medicine and media representation, highlighting the successes of 'The Pit' and the new Invictus board review initiative. We discuss the importance of medical accuracy in shows, the decline in board exam scores, and the vital role of ongoing education. 

• Effect of 'The Pitt' on public perception of emergency medicine
• Collaboration between medical experts and writers for accuracy
• Discussion on the real stories behind emergency care
• Introduction to the Invictus initiative for board exam prep
• Focus on continuous feedback and adaptation in education
• Strategies for addressing declining board exam scores

Youtube Link to this episode: https://youtu.be/jbYiajzT8XE

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Yo, yo, yo, yo yo. People of the Invictus. What's up, Mel Herbert here? Hey, I wanted to give you some updates and some feedback and you gave me the feedback. I'm going to give you back the feedback. So first of all, let's talk about the Pit. The Pit is on Max. It's a big hit. It's Max's number one show.

Speaker 1: 0:23

The reviews have been fantastic from the docs and from the non-docs and from the nurses and from the non-nurses. It's really a great show. People have asked what is our association? So we are an official collaborator on that show. I am a medical consultant.

Speaker 1: 0:37

Joe Sachs is an ER doc. He's the lead medical writer. He was also one of the lead medical writers on EAR, particularly in those last years where it got really good and medically accurate. Our job at MRAT Corpendium my job is to help Joe and his team make it as medically accurate as possible. This is really important to Joe and me and those docs to make it as medically accurate as possible. We all have watched medical TV shows where it's just not accurate at all.

Speaker 1: 1:03

Now, having said that, it's still Hollywood, but boy, they've done such a great job in the procedures and making things work the terminology. A lot of effort has gone into that and I think you can see it. The one place that's really hard to mock up is CPR. Everybody complains like the CPR is so fake. It's true, it is fake Because if you do CPR on a real person, an actor, you will kill them. Don't do that. So it is a bit fake on the CPR, but everything else I think you'll find is really really good. The show is having an impact and it's important. It's important because we want to tell the stories about emergency medicine, about the stresses, about what it's really like right now and the boarding and the psych, the evaluations that don't occur and the fact that for-profits are trying to take over medicine and make you go faster with less. These are the stories that Joe is telling and they're doing such a great job. I'm really proud of the show. I'm so proud to be involved with it and I hope to be involved with it more in the future if we get a second and third season, which we will hopefully hear about soon. So that's the pit. Go watch it Now.

Speaker 1: 2:05

The next thing is Invictus. So what's happening with Invictus? So this free podcast or the video? Whether you're watching on the video or the podcast, we're continuing to feed that with some stuff how to prepare for the exams, how to study for the exams, foils particularly right now we're going through some of the neurological foils. We're going to keep doing that. But at the same time, we're gathering the faculty, we're gathering the slide decks and we're creating what is, in some part, a traditional video-based board review course.

Speaker 1: 2:31

But it's going to be so much more than that. This thing is going to be something that you can use for the rest of your life. We're going to continuously update it. It's going to be audio, it's going to be video, there's going to be discussions. There's going to be QBanks. People ask are there going to be question sets for this? Yes, there's going to be an enormous number of questions that you're going to be able to use. We're going to get together probably weekly and discuss board stuff and questions, and so this is going to be an ongoing project forever because of a lot of reasons.

Speaker 1: 2:58

But one of the things I'm really disturbed about is the fact that the board scores have gone down so much. We haven't been teaching to the boards. We need to teach to the boards a little bit and get them out of the way. The pass rate used to be 98% Now it's 80% and it might go even lower than that. So this is our job. Our thing is to try and make something that's really fun, that you can use all the time so that, just passively, you're going to get smarter and smarter and smarter and the boards are just going to. You know you're going to kill them. It's going to be great. So this is going to be very, very, very different than anything else that has occurred in the board review area. Trust me on this, it's going to be awesome.

Speaker 1: 3:34

Now, people have also asked is this going to be part of MRAP or is it going to be separate? This is actually going to be separate. It's going to be separate because this is really targeted at a very specific group of MRAP users right now students and residents and it's costing a lot of money to put it together, and so the only way to put it on the MRAP would be to increase the charge of MRAP, and I don't want to do that, since most people will actually not be using it. So this will be separate, but it'll be worth it, absolutely worth it to you, I guarantee it, and there'll be some of you that actually want to use this for the rest of your careers, because a Manson Messon probably should be a form of continuous border view, because five years after you've finished you've forgotten half the stuff that could still be walking in the door. So you know that'll be up to you, user defined. So it's happening right now.

Speaker 1: 4:20

The who's who of Board of View will be on the show and I can't wait to get it up and running. What we might do is release a little early, before we have all of the stuff done, a little bit lower price so that we can get even more of your feedback. But please continue to give us your feedback about what you want to see on this program and how you want to see it, and I want to see it on this program and how you want to see it, and I'll keep throwing up these sort of prototype videos and audio and just loving to hear your feedback. Okay, so that's it for now. You got your the pit very good show. You got your invictus. It's awesome.

Speaker 1: 4:52

I'm wearing some merch. Here is some merch. Yeah, check it out, check it out. And uh, the course is based on Corpendium. We have spent five years lots of money, time, effort, faculty, a thousand authors and editors producing the best textbook in emergency medicine, so we're obviously going to be using that as the fundamental basis for this board review. Including the visuals and the illustrations and all that stuff. So the bomb, herbert out of you. Including the visuals and the illustrations and all that stuff, so the bomb. I heard it out.