We’re happy to announce two important improvements to the evaluation forms that are available to all Anesthesiology programs: New Special Assessments and Milestone-Aware Procedural Skills. The existing Anesthesiology EPAs have been widely used to assess Anesthesiology residents at the point-of-care in a way that is intuitive at the time of assessment yet also automatically informs milestone-level calculation. While those EPAs provide good milestone coverage, there are certain milestones that don’t apply to the activities that a resident does while providing patient care. In fact, 16% of the Anesthesiology Milestone Elements are not covered by the Anesthesiology EPAs. These two new improvements aim to fill-in the milestone holes that don’t lend themselves well to EPAs. The new Special Assessments and Milestone-Aware Procedures raise the coverage of Anesthesiology Milestone Elements to 91% as well as provide additional data points to inform milestone calculations.

All of this work has been done in conjunction with Dr. Glenn Woodworth (Regional Anesthesia and Acute Pain Medicine Fellowship Director at OHSU; Anesthesiology Toolbox Editor-in-Chief) and his amazing team. We can’t thank them enough for this partnership.

Special Assessments

The Special Assessments aim to cover experiences that Anesthesiology residents have outside of providing care to patients. They are as follows (click the link to download a PDF with full details on each assessment):

1. Contribution or Leadership of Formal Institutional Quality and/or Safety Activities
2. Review of Personal Outcomes for Quality Improvement
3. Giving and Receiving Feedback
4. Teaching Others
5. Crisis Management
6. Development and Modification of an Individual Learning Plan
7. Demonstration of Basic Professionalism and Personal Wellness Behavior

These assessments are part of the new Special Assessments module in myTIPreport that shows up as a new channel next to the existing EPAs and Procedures channels:

Similar to EPAs and Procedures, these Special Assessments can be filled out by Faculty members on-demand or initiated via requests created by residents or administrators.

Milestone-Aware Procedural Skills

Many Anesthesiology programs are already using the Procedural Skills module in myTIPreport to assess their residents. Up until recently, those Procedural Skill evaluations would not inform Milestone-Level calculations. With these new improvements though, each Procedural Skill evaluation will contribute data to the milestones that apply to the given skill being assessed. Full details on how each procedural skill maps to milestones can be found in this document (the level in a given cell is the level which needs to be achieved for milestone credit to be given).

Activation and Use

The updated Procedural Skills and Special Assessments module are now enabled for all Anesthesiology residency programs and can be used immediately. There is no additional cost to use these new features.

Next Steps in Anesthesiology

While myTIPreport already provides a great experience for Anesthesiology Residencies, there’s still more we can do. Here is our current roadmap:

1. Dr. Woodworth’s team is in the process of developing a set of OSCEs which will be mapped to milestones and will help push towards 100% milestone coverage.
2. We’ll partner with Dr. Woodworth’s team to round-out our Rotation and Faculty Feedback modules so that they are standardized for Anesthesiology Residencies.
3. Dr. Woodworth’s team is developing similar content for Anesthesiology Fellowships and we’ll make that available when it is ready.

If you have any questions or are interested in partnering with us to develop something for your specialty, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected].