An Innovative Feedback Tool Leading to Improved Faculty Feedback and Positive Reception by Residents

INTRODUCTION: In 2012 the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education implemented trainee milestones as tools for clinical competency committees to use for evaluation, feedback, remediation, and promotion purposes. Prior to this innovation, there has not been an adequate method to capture, organize, and graphically illustrate the evaluations by attendings in a simple, fast and organized fashion. METHODS: We created a novel, web-based, mobile-friendly evaluation tool to help fill this identified gap. The survey-based program creates a milestone-based evaluation, takes only a few minutes to complete, and easily collates the results in a graphic format creating an individualized “dashboard.” The dashboard is then used by both trainees and their evaluators as a feedback platform. RESULTS: With the implementation of the dashboard, educational leadership has noted an increase in the number of submitted evaluations of residents and the amount of face-to-face feedback given by attendings to residents. A post-implementation survey of the residents revealed that they found the dashboard-provided feedback more helpful than prior modes of feedback, although the number of evaluations was still too few. CONCLUSION: The use of our feedback dashboard is useful to multiple targeted end-users, including general faculty evaluators, program leadership, and the residents themselves for gathering formative feedback that is specific and timely. This tool is adaptable and likely generalizable to other residency programs and specialties.