In this post, we will explain how the T-Res 2 app is being used for mobile resident assessment in the UBC Plastic Surgery program.

Almost every industry has gone mobile-first, meaning the user experience is designed primarily around the mobile device and the behaviors that it elicits.  In that article, we spoke about the positive effects mobile assessment in the medical education field has on quantity and quality of formative feedback in situated learning and on data integrity.  We walked through the workflow of the app from the perspective of  a preceptor assessing an activity that a resident has just completed.  Here, we’re going to introduce different assessment strategies and two new elements of the app, scale fields and anchor text.

The UBC Plastic Surgery program employs an assessment strategy called Always Evaluate.  T-Res actually provides four evaluation strategies to programs to choose from:

Always Evaluate: Every activity saved by a trainee generates an evaluation that the attending physician may perform.

Lottery: Every activity saved by a trainee will have a certain n percentage chance of generating an evaluation, where n is a number between 0 and 100 entered into the Probability box.

Request: An evaluation is generated for every activity in which the trainee checks the Request Evaluation box.

Procedure-Specific: Select specific procedures using the Configure button that will automatically generate an evaluation. In Advanced Mode, administrators have the option to set the probability per procedure, from 0% to 100%.

Since UBC Plastic Surgery uses the Always Evaluate strategy, an evaluation is triggered for the attending physician to complete for every activity that is logged by a resident.

The program’s field note begins with the standard fields:  Date, Site, Role, Diagnoses.  One field that the program configured specifically to their needs is Surgery Type, for which we can see that ‘Reconstructive’ has been chosen in this demo.

This field note has been filled out by the resident and sent to the supervisor to be assessed.  Note that the supervisor does not need to be the one completing the assessment.  The resident could act as a ‘scribe’, recording the assessments on the scale fields as the preceptor instructs, and proceeding to send the entirely completed assessment form to the supervisor for validation.

Note that the anchor text below the scale field guides the assessor. This helps to achieve accurate assessment and reduce, to a degree, inter-rater differences.  This text can be configured to be program-specific.

Finally, the instructor has the opportunity to enter notes that the resident will see, along with Private Notes that are viewable only to the preceptor.  The preceptor taps the ‘Eval Complete’ button and presses ‘Save’ at the bottom of the screen, and the evaluation is instantly shown as complete on both the preceptor’s and resident’s mobile devices.

Once again, you can easily imagine how this facilitates situated formative feedback. The activity is logged and evaluated in the moments after an activity.  Highlights (and problems) of the activity are top of mind for both parties, and important details can be logged before they fall from short term memory. The opportunity for a reflective moment between resident and preceptor is optimal.

For a demo of the plastic surgery application, send us an email and let us know.  We’ll be happy to give you a demo and explain how our forms are configured.