ACGME Case Log Link Improves Operative Assessment Compliance and Timeliness

BACKGROUND A crucial measure of surgical trainee performance is maturation of operative skill. This is tracked via the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education’s (ACGME) case log. While providing a vital description of resident operative experience, the case log contains no assessments of resident performance. In 2013, we developed and subsequently validated the Operative Entrustiblity Assessment (OEA), a simple web-based evaluation that enables rapid, frequent assessment of resident operative performance. The OEA uses a 5-point scale, is linked to the NAS milestones, and can be used to follow resident performance over time and compare residents to their peers within MileMarker. Residents initiate and pass or e-mail assessments to the attending; evaluations take less than 1 minute to complete. Despite ease of use, obtaining and maintaining user compliance is challenging. To facilitate resident compliance, in April 2017, we incorporated an ACGME case log link into MileMarker. We performed the current study to ascertain the impact of the ACGME case log link on assessment entry and time lapsed from case performance to assessment entry.