New Year, New Look—But the Same Hippo You Know and Love
At Hippo Education, our mission has always been simple:
Empower the people of medicine to learn, grow, and thrive through education and community.
Posts about PA Education
Winter Skin Care for Patients with Atopic Dermatitis: Key Tips for Clinicians
While winter brings snow, festive holidays, and cozy sweaters, it can also bring dry skin. For patients with atopic dermatitis, or eczema, winter often worsens eczema symptoms due to cold air, indoor heating, and increased exposure to triggers such as stress. To help your patients manage their atopic dermatitis, focus on these three key strategies:
Tech in Medicine: Are Smartwatches Changing the Way We Practice?
Smartwatches and other wearable fitness trackers are everywhere—and they’re doing way more than counting steps. These devices now track heart rate variability (HRV), flag irregular heart rhythms, and even record single-lead ECGs. Cool, right? But what happens when a patient walks in with their wrist buzzing and a bunch of data they want us to interpret? Let’s dive into the world of wearables and what they mean for us as healthcare...
Are the PANRE-LA Emergent Topic Questions Causing You Emerging Anxiety?
On the PANRE-LA topic blueprint, NCCPA lists “Emergent Topics” as 2% of the exam. For many exam takers, these questions are causing headaches due to the lack of clear guidance on what will be covered. NCCPA lists “Legal, Ethical, DEI” on the blueprint, but no one knows the exact questions, and the specifics can’t be shared. Let’s dive a bit deeper into these three topics to help ease your anxiety and prepare you for whatever might come up.
Time Management Pearls for Clinicians: Optimizing Efficiency
As healthcare professionals, our days are filled with many tasks, such as patient encounters, documentation, and administrative work, not to mention keeping track of a household or family. Time management becomes crucial in ensuring that we provide quality care while maintaining our well-being. In this blog, we'll explore some valuable pearls for efficient clinical time management, and I’ll note some tips that have worked well for me.
Introducing Practical Pharmacology: An Outpatient Audio Course
Nowhere is the gap between book learning and clinical practice quite so apparent as in the world of pharmacology. The best medication for Diagnosis X is Drug Y on the boards, but what about when your real-life patient is allergic to that medication? What if they can’t afford it? What if there’s a drug shortage?
Read moreCrack the PANRE-LA Code: Tips from the Pros Webinar Recap
Our Hippo PAs had a great time at our Crack the PANRE-LA Code: Tips from the Pros webinar talking about our experiences taking the PANRE-LA. Here, we have reviewed some of the nuts and bolts of the exam and our top tips and tricks. We read through all the questions asked during the webinar and have also addressed some of those here. We hope this helps ease your test anxiety whether you are almost done, halfway through, or about to start...
The DDx for Acute Low Back Pain: SOS
It’s summer, and that is officially the season of the weekend warrior. You know who I’m talking about because you see them every week in your clinic. They decided to take on a new gardening project, a strenuous workout or tried water-skiing for the first time in decades, and now, a few days later they come to you with pain in their lower back.
Boosting HPV Vaccination Rates: Best Practices for Better Clinician Communication
As we enjoy the remainder of our summer but look ahead to the upcoming school year, it’s time to start thinking about those back-to-school physicals and routine immunizations for our patients and our own kiddos. In this blog post, we will offer insight into two current methods of offering HPV vaccinations to our youngsters and their parents/caregivers and discuss which method improves HPV vaccination rates.
Clinicians Are Only Human
Recently, one of my primary care patients sent me a routine question through the electronic medical record, asking when they should get a specific blood test to guide their medication dosing. When an hour went by and I hadn’t responded, my patient called the front desk of our clinic to ask the question over the phone and inquire why I hadn’t written back. They also wrote me another message, voicing their disappointment that I hadn’t...
Why Would I Do That? Postgraduate Emergency Medicine Training for PAs
Are you captivated by the adrenaline-filled environment of emergency medicine (EM)? You’re not alone. EM attracts 12.5% of PAs, making it a popular choice among advanced practice providers. But how do you get started in such a fast-paced, varied, and occasionally high-stakes practice environment?
"I Messed Up"
In the high-stakes world of medicine, where every decision holds weight, the inevitability of human error can loom large over clinicians. It's a reality we all face, yet admitting our mistakes and grappling with their aftermath can be one of the most challenging aspects of our profession. How do we reconcile our desire for perfection with the reality of fallibility? How do we move forward gracefully and resiliently after making a clinical...