It's 6 PM on Tuesday. Grand Rounds is tomorrow at 8 AM. You haven't started the slides.
If that scenario sounds familiar, you're not alone. Grand Rounds preparation is one of the most time-consuming and anxiety-inducing tasks in residency. The expectation is high: attendings want a well-structured case, a sharp differential, a thorough literature review, and clear teaching points — all in 20 slides.
The good news: with the right structure and AI tools, you can go from blank screen to presentation-ready in under 30 minutes.
What Attendings Actually Expect
Before building anything, understand the audience. Grand Rounds attendings are not looking for perfection — they're looking for clinical reasoning and teaching value.
The most common feedback residents get after Grand Rounds:
- →"Your differential was too narrow — what else were you thinking?"
- →"I wanted to see more about the workup decision-making"
- →"The teaching points felt rushed — that's the part we're here for"
- →"Good case, but I couldn't follow the timeline"
Every one of these is a structural problem, not a knowledge problem. The fix is a repeatable deck structure.
The Ideal Grand Rounds Deck Structure
A strong Grand Rounds deck follows this arc — 12 to 18 slides, no more:
- →Slide 1: Case overview — one sentence, patient demographics, chief complaint
- →Slides 2–3: History of present illness — timeline format works best
- →Slide 4: Physical exam findings — highlight the relevant positives and negatives
- →Slides 5–6: Initial workup — labs, imaging, what you ordered and why
- →Slide 7: Differential diagnosis — at least 3 entities with your reasoning
- →Slides 8–9: Key diagnostic studies — the pivotal results that changed your thinking
- →Slide 10: Final diagnosis
- →Slides 11–13: Disease overview — pathophysiology, epidemiology, classification
- →Slides 14–15: Management — current guidelines, what you did, why
- →Slides 16–17: Literature review — 1–2 key papers, what they showed
- →Slide 18: Teaching points — the 3 things you want everyone to remember
The 4 Most Common Mistakes
Avoid these and you're already in the top quartile of Grand Rounds presentations:
- →Too much text per slide — Grand Rounds is a discussion, not a lecture. Bullet points, not paragraphs.
- →Skipping the "why" in workup decisions — attendings want to see your reasoning, not just results
- →Weak differential — a one-entity differential is not a differential. Show you considered alternatives.
- →Teaching points as an afterthought — they should be the climax of the presentation, not a rushed last slide
How AI Accelerates Each Step
Here's where the 30-minute timeline becomes realistic. AI tools like SlideCraft Pro can handle the structural and design work instantly, leaving you to focus on clinical reasoning.
Instead of building each slide from scratch, you enter your topic — say, "Fever of Unknown Origin workup in a 58-year-old" — and get a complete, structured deck in under 30 seconds. The AI generates:
- →A disease overview with pathophysiology and epidemiology
- →A differential diagnosis framework with clinical reasoning
- →Management slides aligned with current guidelines
- →A literature review slide with key study designs
- →Teaching point suggestions based on the case category
Your job then becomes curation and personalization — adding your specific patient details, adjusting the differential to match your case, and inserting the pivotal lab or imaging results.
That's 30 minutes of focused work, not 4 hours of slide-building.
The 30-Minute Grand Rounds Prep Workflow
Here's the exact workflow:
- →Minutes 0–2: Open SlideCraft Pro, enter your diagnosis or main topic
- →Minutes 2–5: Review the generated structure — accept or modify the outline
- →Minutes 5–15: Personalize slides with your patient's specific data (HPI, labs, imaging)
- →Minutes 15–20: Sharpen the differential — add your reasoning, remove generic text
- →Minutes 20–25: Review teaching points — make sure they reflect what's genuinely interesting about the case
- →Minutes 25–30: Final pass — check flow, remove clutter, add one good image per section
Final Thought
Grand Rounds is not about impressing attendings with slide design. It's about demonstrating clinical reasoning and generating a good discussion. The slides are just the vehicle.
The faster you can build the vehicle, the more time you have to actually think about the case.
If you have a Grand Rounds coming up, try generating your deck with SlideCraft Pro — it's free to start, and the first version will be ready before your coffee gets cold.