Improve Program and Resident Performance with MedHub’s Detailed Reporting Features

Editor’s Note: In a recent webinar, MedHub Solutions Engineer, Julie LaBare, examines how resident milestone progression and shares expertise on mapping sub-competencies and elements in evaluation forms and the overall data collection used to support your Clinical Competency Committees (CCC). 

When creating resident evaluation forms, mapping sub-competencies and elements will provide you with comprehensive, objective data that will positively impact resident performance and, ultimately, provide you with valuable information to continuously improve your program.

How to Create Easy-to-Use Evaluation Forms

When developing digital evaluation forms, MedHub helps you aggregate and interpret objective data, which aids in tracking resident progress. Within MedHub, you can map individual questions against competencies, sub-competencies, or what MedHub calls elements (observable elements and attributes). While the milestones have changed, they are updated in MedHub and available for your programs to import.

Some things to keep in mind when writing evaluation questions:

1. Milestones are not intended to be used as evaluation tools. Instead, use language from the Milestones to design scaled, streamlined descriptors creating consistency and building efficiency for faculty completing the forms.
2. Make the language objective, clear, and concise for simplicity. Consider using bullet points instead of full sentences.
3. You can always access resources from the MedHub Community with the evaluation form sharing function to review what similar programs are doing.
4. Capitalize on your faculty members’ knowledge and experience to help with this process, as they have a strong sense of what is considered appropriate progression for trainees at specific PGY levels.

The milestone functionality can integrate into existing evaluation forms that are successful for your organization. Simply tag questions with your desired sub-competencies and elements to begin mapping milestone progress.

How to Map Milestone Progress

Once evaluation forms are created, mapped, and completed, you can begin accessing this objective, reliable trainee data. Mapping allows information to flow through to the competencies, sub-competencies, and elements you’ve identified.

Data can be mapped as broadly or granularly as your institution chooses, depending on how your program wishes to track resident progress. Track to the level of detail that works best for your institution.

Information can be viewed in multiple formats, giving a longitudinal view of each resident by each sub-competency and a peer average, so you can compare peers to peers.

How to Impact Resident Performance

A challenge with competency-based medical education framework is evaluating residents on their own trajectory. The goal is to prepare each resident for unsupervised practice, yet not all learners progress at the same rate.

MedHub provides you with objective data at your fingertips to make informed decisions regarding resident experiences, so you can easily identify areas of individual growth for successful program completion. Using milestone mapping to monitor resident progress, you can:

Measure and monitor progress for individual residents by

• Showing what skills, attributes, and behaviors faculty members believe have been achieved within the milestone framework.
• Providing specific information about the number of questions mapped to each element and number of faculty members who evaluated a resident at a specific level. These values can then be weighed in final evaluation.
• Supporting more efficient CCC meetings by providing data that informs the development of individual learning plans.

Devise specific educational experiences to ensure exposure to areas of concern

• CCCs can recommend specific faculty assignments or additional/specific rotations based on the interest or intended sub-specialty of the resident.
• CCCs can easily identify if a resident is falling behind and form a remediation plan (such as individualized reading assessments with follow-up testing for gaps in content).
• CCCs can suggest electives for specific training, which is not part of the program’s typical curriculum but can be helpful for assessment or development.

Include multi-source data to assess professionalism and interpersonal communication skills

• Being able to map additional forms (like patient evaluations and 360 evaluations) allows surgical staff, nurses, medical secretaries, and other professionals who hold critical information to inform on the development of residents.

How to Continually Improve Your Program

When effectively tracking and evaluating resident progress with MedHub, you'll gain valuable information about your program and opportunities to improve the resident experience. In mapping elements through MedHub, your program can:

• Examine curriculum goals and objectives, ensuring that they align with the milestones in place for your specialties
• Assess what is working and for whom, to understand the educational experiences and their efficacy fully
• Identify and address gaps in training or in capturing assessment data to ensure meaningful and authentic milestone reporting
• Create the opportunity to provide ongoing faculty development specifically related to the milestones identified as areas of potential program improvement

Where to Go For More Guidance

Access additional resources for using ACGME milestones.

Curious about how you can begin improving the overall resident experience and your program as a whole with this detailed assessment management system? Request a demo with MedHub today.