An integral part of a physician's practice includes being a leader, especially as there is a strong need for skilled leaders to advocate and navigate patient-centered and organizational outcomes. Nephrologists undertake multiple leadership roles, but dedicated leadership training is lacking in medical and postgraduate education. Given the growing need for physician leaders, practitioners in nephrology and beyond must become better equipped in understanding the role of leadership skills in medical practice. Nephrology and the medical community as a whole should focus on intentional and dedicated leadership in medical education training to better groom physicians for leadership roles. In this paper, we define and discuss the components and styles of leadership. We further propose cognitive models that allow one to apply leadership theory in common practice.

There is no consistent educational model to introduce the physician assistant and/or nurse practitioner to nephrology. The job descriptions of the nephrology physician assistant/nurse practitioner may be similar, but the training, state and federal licensing, background, and recertification are different for the 2 professions adding a level of complexity to the training of the physician assistant/nurse practitioner new to nephrology. On-the-job training is the most common modality, but formats, content, mentors, and practices vary from organization to organization and even within organizations. The advantage of on-the-job training is its flexibility while the disadvantage is its nonspecific outcomes. As nephrology practices vary widely and range from single provider private practices to multiprovider academic practices, it is difficult if not impossible to develop a generic orientation model. This article outlines the history and present state of postgraduate educational offerings for the physician assistant/nurse practitioner and provides insight into components of an ideal training program.

Evaluations serve as the backbone of any educational program and can be broadly divided into formative and summative evaluations. Formative evaluations are "just in time" evaluations focused on informing the learning process, whereas summative evaluations compare fellows to a preset standard to determine their readiness for unsupervised practice. In the nephrology fellowship programs, evaluations assess competence in the framework of ACGME Milestones 2.0. A variety of learning venues, evaluators, and tools should be incorporated into the measurement process. It is important to determine which milestones can be best assessed in each education venue to decrease the burden of assessment fatigue. Additionally, programs can diversify the evaluators to include nurses, medical students, peers, and program coordinators in addition to faculty to provide a well-rounded assessment of the fellows and share the assessment burden. Lastly, the evaluation data should be presented to fellows in a format where it can inform goal setting. The evaluation system needs to evolve along with the changes being made in curriculum design. This will help to make fellowship learning effective and efficient.

Kidney pathology education is a critical component in training of nephrology fellows, as well as for continuing medical education for practicing nephrologists. Kidney pathology images are included on nephrology fellow board exams, and clinicopathologic correlation of kidney biopsy findings is critical in everyday clinical practice. Nephropathology training is a requirement by the American College of Graduate Medical Education within nephrology fellowship curricula. However, greater than one-third of fellowship program directors believe that nephropathology training for their fellows is not sufficient. During the Coronavirus Disease-19 pandemic, the use of digital learning has become commonplace with virtual conferences (local, national, and international) and online meetings becoming the norm for education. Nephrology has become a leader in free open-access online medical education, both prior to and, to even a greater extent, during the pandemic. Here, we review available resources to nephrology fellows and other learners to supplement nephropathology training, which includes medical blogs, journal clubs, interactive quizzes and games, online conferences, podcasts, and mentorship opportunities. These resources are archived and provide durable content to learners of all stages of training, even beyond the pandemic.

Nephrologists have a significant role in educating and mentoring trainees. They are considered role models and a major reason for fellows to be attracted to the specialty. Nephrology training programs not only support fellows in their teaching endeavors but also provide them with the necessary knowledge and skills required for advancing their careers as clinician educators. However, such career development tracks are limited in number and most focus on early career faculty. Here we present an overview of the various teaching opportunities for fellows at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Nephrology fellowship program and the development of a fellow-oriented clinician educator track. Our goal as part of the nephrology community is to empower the current nephrology fellows to develop fulfilling careers as nephrology clinician educators.

Nephrology education has changed significantly since the first nephrology fellowship programs were established in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. The past several years have seen increased opportunities for subspecialization in areas such as interventional nephrology, onconephrology, and glomerular disease. Notable trends in fellowship curricula include the expansion of education in home dialysis and palliative care, driven by policy changes and focus on patient-centered care. In addition, point-of-care ultrasound has garnered significant interest due to its potential to provide diagnostic information that improves patient care. An important area that remains largely unaddressed appears to be education about the business and administrative aspects of nephrology. Meanwhile, the importance of training in hemodialysis catheter placement and kidney biopsy has come into question due to the small proportion of nephrologists performing these procedures today. Nephrology fellowship programs should strive to tailor their curriculum to meet the interests and needs of individual fellows.

Dwindling interest in nephrology amid a growing prevalence of kidney disease has inspired nephrologists to create educational initiatives for trainees. Engagement at all levels is crucial to fostering interest in the field, and experience for internal medicine residents has been a significant area for growth. In this article, we review the literature on available educational programs at the residency level. These interventions were largely met with high trainee satisfaction and positive feedback, particularly when designed with the goal to create superb internists rather than future nephrologists. Based on the available literature and our own experience at the University of Pennsylvania, we propose that such approaches will be better-received and engender a greater love for nephrology.

Addressing persistent racial health disparities in cases of kidney disease will first require significant investment in examining how structural racism has influenced our clinical practice and medical education. Improving how we understand and articulate race is critical for achieving this goal. This work begins with ensuring that race's mention within nephrology literature and curricular materials for medical trainees is thoroughly rooted in evidence-based rationale-not to serve as a proxy for polygenic contributions, social determinants of health, or systemic health care barriers. While many institutions are increasingly recognizing the importance of instituting such changes on behalf of the systematically marginalized patient populations who are most affected by these disparities, there is a paucity of guidance on how to critically appraise and revise decades of pathophysiological and epidemiological findings through an antiracist lens. In this article, we propose an inquiry-based framework with case-study examples to help readers recognize improper use of race within nephrology, assess personal and institutional readiness to introduce changes to said content, and generate materials that center evidence-based findings and reject harmful misinterpretations of race.

Although medical schools across the United States have updated their curricula to incorporate active learning techniques, there has been little discussion on the nature of the content presented to students. Here, we share detailed examples of our experience in using original experiments to lay the groundwork for foundational concepts in renal physiology and pathophysiology. We believe that this approach offers distinct advantages over standard case-based teaching by (1) starting with simple concepts, (2) analyzing memorable visuals, (3) increasing graphical literacy, (4) translating observations to "rules," (5) encouraging critical thinking, and (6) providing historical perspective to the study of medicine. Although we developed this content for medical students, we have found that many of these lessons are also appropriate as foundational concepts for residents and fellows and serve as an excellent springboard for increasingly complex discussions of clinical applications of physiology. The use of original experiments for teaching and learning in renal physiology harnesses skills in critical thinking and provides a solid foundation that will help learners with subsequent case-based learning in the preclerkship curriculum and in the clinical arena.

We reviewed some of the latest advancements in the use of mathematical models in nephrology. We looked over 2 distinct categories of mathematical models that are widely used in biological research and pointed out some of their strengths and weaknesses when applied to health care, especially in the context of nephrology. A mechanistic dynamical system allows the representation of causal relations among the system variables but with a more complex and longer development/implementation phase. Artificial intelligence/machine learning provides predictive tools that allow identifying correlative patterns in large data sets, but they are usually harder-to-interpret black boxes. Chronic kidney disease (CKD), a major worldwide health problem, generates copious quantities of data that can be leveraged by choice of the appropriate model; also, there is a large number of dialysis parameters that need to be determined at every treatment session that can benefit from predictive mechanistic models. Following important steps in the use of mathematical methods in medical science might be in the intersection of seemingly antagonistic frameworks, by leveraging the strength of each to provide better care.

Unstructured data in the electronic health records contain essential patient information. Natural language processing (NLP), teaching a computer to read, allows us to tap into these data without needing the time and effort of manual chart abstraction. The core first step for all NLP algorithms is preprocessing the text to identify the core words that differentiate the text while filtering out the noise. Traditional NLP uses a rule-based approach, applying grammatical rules to infer meaning from the text. Newer NLP approaches use machine learning/deep learning which can infer meaning without explicitly being programmed. NLP use in nephrology research has focused on identifying distinct disease processes, such as CKD, and extraction of patient-oriented outcomes such as symptoms with high sensitivity. NLP can identify patient features from clinical text associated with acute kidney injury and progression of CKD. Lastly, inclusion of features extracted using NLP improved the performance of risk-prediction models compared to models that only use structured data. Implementation of NLP algorithms has been slow, partially hindered by the lack of external validation of NLP algorithms. However, NLP allows for extraction of key patient characteristics from free text, an infrequently used resource in nephrology.