Navigating the Next Accreditation System: A Dashboard for the Milestones

Abstract

In July 2014, all residency programs accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) were enrolled in a new system called the Next Accreditation System. Residency programs may not be clear on how best to comply with these new accreditation requirements. Large amounts of data must be collected, evaluated, and submitted twice a year to the council's Web-based data collection system. One challenge is that the new "end-of-rotation" evaluations must reflect specialty-specific milestones, on which many faculty members are not well versed. Like other residency programs, we tried to address the challenges using our local resources. We used our existing electronic goals and objectives for each rotation coupled with appropriate end-of-rotation evaluations reflecting the specialty-specific milestones through a process of editing and mapping. Data extracted from these evaluations were added to an interactive dashboard that also contained evaluations on additional program-specific modifiers of residents' performance. A resident's final overall performance was visually represented on a plot graph. The novel dashboard included features to save evaluations for future comparisons and to track residents' progress during their entire training. It proved simple to use and was able to reduce the time needed for each resident evaluation to 5 to 10 minutes. This tool has made it much easier and less challenging for the members of our Clinical Competency Committee to start deliberation about each resident's performance.