This coming year is one of fairly significant transition for programs in Child Neurology and Neurodevelopmental Disabilities. We will all need to initiate the use of the ACGME Milestones as the central metric for gauging progress of our trainees through the course of their training, and report the collated results by training year to the ACGME.
The PCN would like to assist everyone to the greatest extent possible, and to that end, we will be offering the following materials through our portal on the CNS main website, and the dedicated, secure PCN workspace on the new CNS Connect website.
The Universal Curriculum – first developed under the leadership of Rob Rust, and finished and distributed to every program over the last year, we will offer a version cross-referenced with the Milestones by January 2015. This will allow you to have some reference points for what the various levels of mastery outlined in the Milestones mean in the context of various specific topics.
Milestones Metrics – we will have three sets of metrics available, each demonstrated at the PCN meeting this fall.
Dr. Karen Keough and the Educational SIG membership have developed a paper-based tool in checklist format. This has the greatest flexibility, in that it is not designed to be rotation-specific and requires no hardware or software other than downloading from the website; its use would require staff time to encode and collate responses from various faculty members on a given resident, and would require someone upload into thereporting domain of to the ACGME WebADS.
Dr. Marc DiSabella has offered the Entrustable Professional Activities metrics he and his colleagues have been using; these are compatible with Med Hub (if your institution uses this). They are rotation specific but could be adapted to the particularities of your rotations.
Finally, Greplytix is offering the PCN its software MedInSight, a computer based rating tool that allows for frequent data collection using the milestones directly. The software collates and presents data and trends by resident and resident class, and formats a report for the Clinical Competency Committee on each resident. It also formats the data for direct entry to the ACGME WebADS. If 40 or more programs opt for this software, they would offer it to us for the following pricing structure. For the first three residents, the fee would be $100/month, and then $45/month for every resident thereafter(their usual fee is $500/month per residency program).
The material from Drs. Keough and DiSabella will be uploaded to the website by early January along with explanatory material. For those who did not see the demonstration of the Greplytix MedInsight software at the PCN, we will have a slide show and a short video link available in early January via the website as well.
With these tools, I trust that programs will have ample time to plan for the transition to Milestones reporting.
Clinical Case Software – At the PCN, Dr. Ira Bergman demonstrated his case-based software program. While it currently resides outside the CNS portion of cyberspace, we are working to link these effectively and smoothly, and develop more cases in conjunction with the ongoing work of the CNS Electronic Communications Committee chaired by Dr. David Hsieh to expand this learning option for programs. Again, these cases correlate well with the medical knowledge metrics within Milestones.
Quality Improvement Education – Dr. Kiran Maski has developed a child neurology specific curriculum regarding QI, and has tested this in the Boston Children’s Hospital training program for the last several years. We will make that curriculum available to programs via the website, which should be helpful in living into Practice Based Learning metrics in a way most child neurology and NDD residents will find more related tot heir work.
My fervent hope for the next two years is that the PCN can serve as a conduit and forum for materials and methods that will be useful to programs in Child Neurology and Neurodevelopmental Disabilities. If there is anything you would find useful in these regards, please contact me and I’ll see what can be done.
Peace.
