Society for Improving Medical Professional Learning Collaborative: What’s It All About?

Abstract

The Society for Improving Medical Professional Learning (SIMPL) Collaborative is a non-profit, educational, quality improvement consortium focused on developing tools, curricula, and policies to improve physician training. The goal is to provide educators and learners with convenient, reliable, and valid evaluation tools for frequent, real-time workplace assessment and feedback. The SIMPL Operating Room application provides this platform. It was developed to provide high-quality, time-sensitive, procedural feedback. Its objective is to facilitate intra-rotation corrections. SIMPL is available to all residency programs and has matured to include over 175 residency programs, involving 19 different specialties, 4000 trainees, 5000 attendings, and 354,800 evaluations in 3 countries. At least 52 peer-reviewed manuscripts have used the evolving database. We have performed an expert narrative review of the entire SIMPL literature (primary research studies, reviews, and websites) to discuss the unique lessons learned from this large collaborative experience. SIMPL can be the core of a competency-based operative skills assessment that is incorporated into medical training, assessment, and certification. Higher quality feedback is provided via SIMPL compared to the routine end-of-rotation evaluations with a corrective comment 60% of the time versus 15%, respectively. A high overall correlation between residents and faculty within case complexity has also been documented (r = 0.76, P < .0001), technical performance (r = 0.66, P < .0001), and autonomy (r = 0.56, P < .0001). The goal of the SIMPL initiative is to use resident performance to drive continuous quality improvement of the individual, programs, and larger medical system.