Surgery goes EPA (Entrustable Professional Activity) – how a strikingly easy to use app revolutionizes assessments of clinical skills in surgical training

OBJECTIVE: Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) are increasingly being used in competency-based medical education approaches. A general lack of time in clinical settings, however, prevents supervisors from providing their trainees with adequate feedback. With a willingness for more administrative tasks being low in both trainees and educators, the authors developed a radical user-friendly mobile application based on the EPA concept called “Surg-prEPAred”. DESIGN: Surg-prEPAred is designed to collect micro-assessment data for building competency profiles for surgical residents according to their curriculum. The goal of Surg-prEPAred is to facilitate the performance and documentation of workplace-based assessments. Through aggregated data the app generates a personalized competency profile for every trainee. During a pilot run of 4 months, followed by ongoing usage of the application with a total duration of 9 months (August 2019 to April 2020), 32 residents and 33 consultants made daily use of the application as a rating tool. Every rating included knowledge, skills and professional attitudes of the trainees. Before the initiation of the App and after the 9-month trial period trainees and supervisors where both sent questionnaires to evaluate the user friendliness and effectiveness of the App. RESULTS: Five hundred ten App based assessments were generated. Out of 40 pre-defined EPAs, 36 were assessed. 15 trainees and 16 supervisors returned the questionnaires and stated the surg-prEPAred App as very valuable, effective and feasible to evaluate trainees in a clinical setting providing residents with an individual competence portfolio to receive precision medical education. CONCLUSIONS: The authors expectation is that the Surg-prEPAred App will contribute to an improvement of quality of medical education and thus to the quality of patient care and safety. In the future the goal is to have the App become an integral part of the official Swiss surgical curriculum accepted by the Swiss professional surgical society. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12909-022-03622-1.