Infectious Diseases Fellowship Columbia - Curriculum

In coordination with our Pulmonary and Critical Care Fellowship Program, fellows will complete all requirements to be board eligible for critical care. This includes the care of the critically ill and medical/surgical patients to fulfill ACGME requirements.

Full curriculum

The inpatient consult services occur at Prisma Health Richland Hospital (PHR) and Columbia VA Healthcare System Facilities.  

• PHR is a public, not-for-profit 641-bed tertiary care hospital which serves as a major referral center for physicians across the Midlands of South Carolina.  
• The Columbia VA is a 244-bed regional referral center, which encompasses acute medical, surgical, psychiatric, and long-term care. This facility has strong ties with the USC School of Medicine and serves as a major teaching facility for the residency and fellowship training programs.

Our goal is to provide training, mentoring and clinical experience in consultative services related to the care and management of hospitalized adults with infectious diseases. By the end of the fellowship, the fellow should complete 10-12 months combined at these sites with a minimum of 250 consults. 

Prisma Health Immunology (PHI) is a combined HIV and general infectious diseases clinic (IC). The IC is the state’s largest HIV care service center, and since 1993, the USC Division of Infectious Diseases has coordinated a partnership of over 20 member agencies that deliver care across an eight-county area. The IC has approximately 2000 HIV-infected individuals and provides medical care, medical case management, substance abuse screening, referral and treatment, medications assistance, mental health services, perinatal HIV prevention case management, and HIV discharge planning from the SC Department of Corrections. It serves a diverse community with broad ethnic gender and social backgrounds and exposes fellows to newly diagnosed HIV patients as well as those with complicated/uncomplicated opportunistic infections. Interdisciplinary approaches to patient care are utilized throughout the course of the training.

In addition to comprehensive HIV services the PHI is the referral center for general infectious disease consults, continuity of care for inpatient infectious diseases consults, including OPAP, hepatitis c management, HIV prevention and STI care. At the PHI fellows will also manage a variety of infectious diseases, ranging from general to viral hepatitis, complex surgical, neurosurgical, cardiovascular and orthopedic infections, tropical/travel medicine, and zoonoses.

Each fellow will have a continuity clinic throughout the fellowship consisting of 1–2 sessions per week where they will build a panel of patients. Over the course of the fellowship, this panel is expected to grow to more than 60 patients, 25 of which will be HIV.

The robust multidisciplinary program with infectious diseases, infection prevention, and pharmacy provides ASP services for three major hospitals in the PH system. The PH-Midlands ASP has received a designation of Antimicrobial Stewardship Center of Excellence by the IDSA. In addition, the Division of Infectious Disease ASP leads the statewide stewardship initiative in collaboration with the Department of Public Health, the School of Pharmacy, and the Antimicrobial Stewardship Collaborative of South Carolina (ASC-SC). 

• Fellows gain an understanding of the hospital antimicrobial formulary, local antibiograms and antimicrobial stewardship protocols and procedures to optimize the use of antimicrobial agents
• Fellows have a 2-4 week-rotation with the ASP team each year of their fellowship. During this rotation the fellows will work one-on-one with the ASP director and infectious diseases PharmD.
• In addition to daily ASP rounds, fellows participate in interdisciplinary meetings, including monthly hospital wide ASP meetings, two weekly statewide ECHO meetings 
• Fellows also participate in the development of ongoing projects, protocols, guidelines and clinical pathways 
• Opportunities exist for a 3rd year ASP track.

View the ASP team’s resource page

A robust multi-hospital IP program covers both the inpatient hospital programs as well as affiliated ambulatory sites (several Palmetto Health sites). Fellows gain practical experience in IP hospital epidemiology and procedures for outbreak investigation and preventative measures are.

Our comprehensive didactics consists of a diverse series of lecture topics and case conferences presented by both the fellow and faculty (physician and PharmD).

This complements the clinical experience, cultivates better understanding of ID topics, including (but not limited to):

This complements the clinical experience, cultivates better understanding of ID topics, including (but not limited to):

• Hospital epidemiology and infection prevention.
• Microbiology.
• Infections in patients with major impairments of host defense.
• Hardware infections.
• HIV resistance/new therapies.
• Tropical disease and research methodology.

This also serves to provide a forum to discuss up-to-date literature, controversies in infectious disease, medical errors and complications and management of complicated infectious disease patients. The program uses a multidisciplinary approach with the help of public health and infectious diseases pharmacy faculty. 

Research training is done through the Research Lecture Series, Journal Club and research mentoring. Our goal is to advance the fellow's knowledge of the basic principles of research, including how such research is conducted, evaluated, explained to patients and applied to clinical practice.

Fellows will identify a research project during the first six months and coordinate with a mentor to develop a research protocol. Fellows will be expected to complete one research and quality improvement project as well as demonstrate evidence of scholarly activity either through publications in a peer reviewed journal or presentation at a regional or national meetings.

Pediatric Infectious Disease, Microbiology, Transplant Infectious Disease, Infection Prevention [IP], Refugee/Survivor of Torture, LGBTQIA+, HBO, Ultrasound and Public Health.