C2B - 01: FEASIBILITY OF REAL-TIME MEASUREMENT OF TECHNICAL SKILLS IN FLEXIBLE ENDOSCOPY USING A SMART PHONE APPLICATION
David A Edelman, MD, MSHPEd, FACS1, Michael Drapiza, BS1, Alan Harzman, MD2, John Webber, MD1, Sam Tarras, MD1, Donald Weaver, MD1; 1Wayne State University School of Medicine, 2The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center
Background: The training of surgery residents is actively evolving. Documentation of operative proficiency is emerging as a more important issue. Ensuring endoscopic skill proficiency is a major challenge, and currently, there is no standardized method for assessing and monitoring resident’s flexible endoscopy experience. Our institution has developed a smart phone application that allows faculty to provide real time GAGES scores of residents performing flexible endoscopy. The purpose of this study is to establish the feasibility of integrating the usage of this innovation application into the workflow of busy, academic clinician educator surgeons.
Methods: This is a prospective, pilot study that occurred over a 6-month period (February 2017 through August 2017). Four attending surgeons participated, and were asked to complete as many evaluations as possible. After initial training on how to use the smart phone application, no additional reminders were given to the faculty. Data collected were the number of evaluations completed by each faculty member, the date and time of each evaluation, and the actual GAGE score for each resident. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the distribution of faculty evaluations and the ratings for each PGY level resident. Ease of use was evaluated by conducting unstructured interviews to the participating faculty.
Results: During the study period, the four attending surgeons completed 239 evaluations on 21 residents. Of the evaluations completed, 163 used the GAGES upper endoscopy form, and 76 used the GAGES lower endoscopy form. Of the 239 evaluations, additional comments were made on 91 (38%) of the evaluations.
Conclusion: In summary, this study shows the feasibility of using our real-time smartphone application to evaluate residents on endoscopy skill using GAGES scores. Future steps include opening this smart phone application to all members of the department of surgery and use it through out the residency. Eventually, incorporation of the real time GAGES scores into the 6-month summative evaluation that the Clinical Competency Committee performs would be ideal.