Bloomington Internal Medicine Residency

The Internal Medicine Residency program at Indiana University School of Medicine—Bloomington and IU Health Bloomington Hospital was accredited in April 2025. It is designed to provide comprehensive experience in internal medicine to train its residents for careers in primary care, rural health medicine and general hospitalist medicine, and for further training in medicine subspecialties. The program will welcome its first class of residents in July 2026.

This is a community-based program in an academic setting, and we offer the benefits of both types of internal medicine programs. IU Health Bloomington Hospital was completed in 2021, moving into the new Regional Academic Health Center. This state-of-the-art facility allows Indiana University and IU Health to partner and work under one roof, giving our community access to cutting-edge medical education in medicine, nursing, social work and speech and hearing, as well as innovative hospital care.

Medical Education in Bloomington

Medical education has been a part of the main Indiana University campus in Bloomington for more than 50 years, welcoming first- through fourth-year medical students.

In addition to working in the Big 10 collegiate environment of Bloomington, internal medicine residents will also work in more rural areas of southern Indiana at critical access hospitals and clinics in Bedford and Paoli. This part of the state is underserved, and residents will learn how to care for patients in areas with more limited resources.

Ambulatory experience is emphasized in our program. Residents will have continuity clinic in the IU Health Residency Primary Care Clinic, which is a dedicated outpatient teaching clinic. Residents will spend one full day per week in clinic caring for their patients in a longitudinal manner, free from other responsibilities. They will be supervised by board-certified internal medicine primary care physicians and work collaboratively as a team of physicians, pharmacists, nurses, social workers and care managers.

In addition to providing excellent hospital care, residents will gain extensive experience in the performance of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. ICU rotations will expose residents to cutting-edge use of bedside ultrasound for quick diagnosis supplementation as well as procedural assistance. Residents can perform a variety of procedures early on in their training, such as central lines, thoracentesis and paracentesis.

These procedural opportunities will be supplemented with simulation. A large, 12,000-square-foot simulation center at the Regional Academic Health Center in Bloomington includes six examination rooms, seven simulation rooms and seven debriefing rooms that allow for observation of the residents by audio and visual means. The center — which is accredited by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare — features the latest in high technology, full-body simulators, standardized patient actors and clinical equipment to best reflect real patient-care practices.

Research and Special Projects

Learning industry-developed quality improvement methods, residents will devise and implement QI projects to improve patient care and hospital/clinic operations to work toward better patient care, delivered efficiently in the right venues, with reduced costs will be the focus of our quality/patient safety training. Working during a dedicated month for quality and safety, residents will be immersed in a culture of patient safety. Residents will participate in hospital quality improvement initiatives and safety committees, participating in root cause analysis and adverse event analyses. Residents designed and completed safety QI or PI projects will be presented at school, regional, state and national forums.

Residents will be involved with research and scholarly activity. They will complete research projects with an emphasis on their quality/process improvement project. They will also have the time and opportunity to work on other basic science and clinical research projects through IU Bloomington and IU School of Medicine and are always encouraged and supported to publish.

Faculty

The IU Bloomington Internal Medicine Residency program is headed by dedicated members of the IU School of Medicine faculty. They work in various settings including primary care, hospital-based medicine and subspecialty care, and have earned numerous teaching awards in a variety of settings including with undergraduate medical students at IU Bloomington. They will help residents not only develop into excellent clinicians but also excellent teachers. Residents will get the opportunity to teach learners at a variety of levels including IU School of Medicine students.

Full accreditation by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) virtually guarantees that each resident will develop proficiency in the diagnosis and treatment of adult medical problems.

Our goal is to train a complete internist — a humanistic physician with broad medical intellect, clinically competent in case management and procedural skills.