How to Present a Case Report: A Slide-by-Slide Guide

You get assigned a case. You have 24 hours. The attending expects a clear, concise presentation with sharp clinical reasoning and well-designed slides. Where do you even start?

Case reports are the most common presentation format in medical education — morning report, case conference, noon lecture, teaching rounds. Yet most residents are never formally taught how to structure them as slide decks. The result: dense text walls, missing context, and slides that put the audience to sleep.

This guide gives you the exact slide-by-slide structure that works across every specialty and every audience.

Why Case Report Structure Matters

A case report is not a chart note. It is a teaching tool. The goal is not to present every piece of data from the chart — it is to walk the audience through a clinical reasoning exercise.

The best case presentations share three qualities:

• They follow a predictable structure so the audience can focus on reasoning, not navigation
• They reveal information sequentially to build diagnostic suspense
• They end with concrete teaching points the audience can apply tomorrow

When you have a clear structure, building the slides becomes a fill-in-the-blanks exercise. Here is the structure used by top academic medical centers.

The 10-Slide Case Report Structure

This framework works for a standard 10–15 minute case presentation. Adjust the number of slides based on case complexity, but keep the flow intact.

Slide 1: Title Card

Include the case title (keep it vague to preserve the diagnostic reveal), your name, institution, and date. Avoid putting the diagnosis in the title. Something like "A 62-Year-Old Man with Progressive Dyspnea" works better than "Case of Pulmonary Fibrosis."

Slide 2: Chief Complaint & HPI

Start with the patient demographics and chief complaint in one line. Then present the HPI as a focused narrative — not a copy-paste from the chart. Focus on the timeline, pertinent positives, and pertinent negatives.

Keep this to 5–7 lines maximum. If you cannot summarize the HPI in that space, you are including too much detail. The slide should read like a well-written admission note, not an Epic printout.

Slide 3: Past History & Medications

List past medical history, surgical history, medications, and allergies. Use two columns if needed. Only include items relevant to the case — if the patient has 15 medications, highlight the 4–5 that matter for the differential.

Slide 4: Physical Exam & Vitals

Present vitals prominently (use a table or bold formatting). For the physical exam, lead with the abnormal findings and briefly note pertinent normal findings. A common mistake is listing the entire review of systems here — save that for the chart.

Slide 5: Initial Workup

Present labs, imaging, and studies ordered on admission. Use a table for lab values and highlight abnormals. If imaging is available, show the actual image with an arrow or annotation — attendings remember images far better than numbers.

Slide 6: Differential Diagnosis

This is the most important slide in the deck. Present 3–5 diagnoses with a brief rationale for and against each. A visual format works well — a table with columns for "Diagnosis," "Supports," and "Against." Alternatively, use an algorithm or decision tree if the case warrants it.

Do not skip to the answer. The audience should be thinking through the differential with you. This is where clinical teaching happens.

Slide 7: Additional Workup & Results

Show the next round of tests that narrowed the differential. Present results sequentially — not all at once. If a biopsy, culture, or specialized test was the key finding, give it its own slide with the result highlighted.

Slide 8: Final Diagnosis

The reveal. State the diagnosis clearly. Include diagnostic criteria if applicable (e.g., Duke criteria for endocarditis, Light criteria for pleural effusion). One slide, clean and definitive.

Slide 9: Management & Outcome

What was done for the patient? Include treatment initiated, response to treatment, and hospital course summary. If the patient had a follow-up, include it. Attendings want to know the outcome — not just the diagnosis.

Slide 10: Teaching Points

End with 3–5 bullet points that the audience should remember. These should be evidence-based takeaways, not opinions. Reference a key study or guideline if possible. This slide is what people photograph with their phones — make it clean and memorable.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

After reviewing hundreds of case presentations, these are the patterns that consistently lose the audience:

• Putting the diagnosis in the title — it kills the diagnostic suspense
• Copy-pasting the HPI from the chart — attendings can spot this immediately
• Skipping the differential — jumping from workup to diagnosis feels like a mystery novel with no middle chapters
• Text-heavy slides with 12+ bullet points — if the audience is reading, they are not listening to you
• No teaching points — the case becomes an anecdote instead of a learning exercise
• Using clip art or low-resolution images — one blurry CT scan undermines your credibility

Formatting Tips That Elevate Your Slides

Design matters more than most residents think. Attendings notice polish — even if they do not articulate it.

• Use a consistent color scheme throughout (avoid rainbow slides)
• One idea per slide — if you are reading your slide to the audience, it has too much text
• Use images and diagrams where possible — a CT with annotations beats a paragraph describing findings
• Number your slides (1/10, 2/10) so the audience knows where they are in the presentation
• Use sans-serif fonts at 24pt minimum — readability from the back of the room matters

How to Build a Case Report Deck in 5 Minutes

If structuring all of this manually sounds time-consuming, it is. A typical case presentation takes 2–4 hours to build from scratch — most of that spent on formatting, not thinking.

AI slide generators can compress this dramatically. With SlideCraft, you enter your case topic and the AI generates the complete 10-slide structure — HPI template, differential layout, teaching point slides — with professional medical design applied automatically.

You still do the clinical reasoning. The AI handles the structure and design. The result: a polished case report deck in minutes instead of hours.

Adapting the Structure by Audience

The 10-slide structure above is a baseline. Adjust based on context:

• Morning Report (10 min): Compress to 6–7 slides. Skip the title card. Lead with HPI and get to the differential fast.
• Case Conference (20 min): Use the full 10-slide structure. Add a literature review slide after the diagnosis.
• Grand Rounds (30+ min): Expand the discussion section. Add 2–3 slides on the disease topic with key references and evidence.
• Tumor Board / M&M: Replace teaching points with a systems analysis or treatment decision framework.

The Bottom Line

Case reports follow a predictable structure. Once you internalize that structure, building the slides becomes fast and repeatable. Focus your energy on the clinical reasoning — the part that actually teaches — and let the structure handle itself.

The best presenters are not the ones with the fanciest slides. They are the ones who tell a clear clinical story with a clean structure and a memorable teaching point at the end.