Clinical Portfolio Guidelines

Guidelines for Preparing and Submitting A Clinical Portfolio For Promotions Review

1. General Guidelines

a. The Clinical Portfolio as part of your packet

The Clinical Portfolio is a relatively new feature of a promotions packet at the UMSOM. Clinicians are encouraged to document their clinical roles and to maintain a portfolio of evidence of their impact or effectiveness in these roles.

The roles of clinicians at the UMSOM are many and varied, and the measures of impact and effectiveness are many. Data may include hours spent in direct patient care, numbers of patients seen, numbers of procedures performed or studies analyzed, or billings or RVUs. Data may be collected relative to a clinical focus, such as the implementation of new patient safety guidelines, patient outcomes from clinical care performed, or the impact that one’s work may have on addressing a local, regional or national need for specialty care of some kind.

Annual Clinical Portfolio review with a mentor or Chair can guide a faculty member to develop a clinical role that has value to the individual and to the institution. The faculty member may be encouraged to seek training to develop a specialty interest, or may be supported to develop a unique clinical role. Evidence of the impact of your clinical role can support your candidacy for promotion or tenure or both.

b. Documentation of your clinical roles, activity and impact or outcome.

We suggest that you begin by listing your major clinical responsibilities in the past 5 years. These may include direct patient care in a variety of settings such as: inpatient service, outpatient clinic service, operating theatre service, and home care. You may also have indirect patient care responsibility in one or more settings if you perform or read the results of diagnostic or other clinical tests such as EEGs or stress tests, diagnostic imaging or laboratory studies.

You may have one or more leadership roles in a clinical setting. These may include developing and practicing in a new specialty clinic, serving as the lead clinician or director of a clinic or center, or be appointed a leader for quality assurance or patient safety performance improvement. You will want to document carefully your role, and the impact or outcome of your work in that role. Your data may include numbers of patient visits or RVUs, patient satisfaction data, referral data, or in the case of patient safety possibly a change in a measurement such as improvement in incidence of an identified problem such as a line infection as a result of your study and intervention.

2. Format

There are a number of acceptable formats for presenting your clinical roles and impact data so that the Committee can evaluate your clinical work. We suggest the following categories as a starting point:

1. Direct Patient Care and Indirect Patient Care
2. Innovation and Leadership in the Clinical Setting
3. Performance Improvement in the Clinical Setting

It is likely that you will have one or more clinical roles in one or more of the above settings. It will be the rare candidate who will have roles and impact data in all 3 settings at an early stage in their career. The Committee does not expect you to have data in all 3 categories but rather looksfor evidence of achievement in your chosen work.

We encourage candidates to speak with faculty in their own departments for examples of clinical portfolios.

3. Letters

In addition to the letters that your department will solicit on your behalf from colleagues internal and external to the School of Medicine, the Committee will accept up to 3 letters in support of your clinical portfolio. We suggest that you provide the names of one or more individuals who can comment on the impact or outcome of your roles, such as a referringphysician or a colleague who can verify the impact or quality of your clinical role.

4. Resources

Faculty members are encouraged to speak with their department APT contacts and their department Chair as early as possible in this process.

Here is an SOM-generated sample of a Clinical Portfolio