Enhancing Resident Scholarly Productivity by Facilitating Web-Based Access to Publicly Accessible Datasets.

Abstract

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Program Requirements for Internal Medicine state that “residents should participate in scholarly activity” and “the sponsoring institution and program should allocate adequate educational resources to facilitate resident involvement in scholarly activities.”1 More than a quarter of programs surveyed in the 2015 Internal Medicine ACGME Resident Survey report being unsatisfied with opportunities for resident scholarly activity. Several programs have instituted resource-intensive initiatives to address this issue, but it is unclear how sustainable these interventions are. In addition, many of these initiatives require faculty with extensive research experience as well as significant resources, and generalizing them is challenging. Lack of access to useable clinical data and the lack of expertise with basic statistical techniques are both additional barriers to robust resident research initiatives.The National Inpatient Sample (NIS) is the largest publicly available all-payer inpatient health care database in the United States. The rich dataset includes demographic, diagnostic, and outcome data on a broad sample of inpatients, allowing queries on multiple important inpatient topics, but requires the use of complex statistical software for access. We imported the 2012 NIS into a database and created a web-based front end, allowing residents to easily query the dataset and extract smaller subsets of data for analysis. The web-based tool is designed to be simple to use, and results are available within minutes. Queries can be adjusted based on results, and then the results can be easily exported into Microsoft Excel (Microsoft Corp, Redmond, WA). Free statistical tools for Excel supported with a video-based tutorial enable residents to evaluate the data and to develop conclusions.Our residency program has had dramatic success with these innovations. In the first 2 years of this intervention, 10 resident projects were accepted to national meetings for abstract/poster presentations, including the American Society of Hematology, American College of Gastroenterology, American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Heart Association, CHEST, and IDWeek (table). Residents report satisfaction with the ease of data extraction and processing. Overall costs included only the cost of acquiring data, as all programming and server expenses were donated by the institution. The expense of scaling the project to an external server would be marginal, and seed funding to further develop and disseminate this tool to other residency programs is being explored.