TY - JOUR
T1 - SCORE – Leveling the Playing Field for Surgical Training Programs
AU - Onufer, Emily Jean
AU - Trolard, Anne
AU - Hickey, Mark
AU - Lyons, William
AU - Klingensmith, Mary E.
AU - Malangoni, Mark A.
AU - Joshi, Amit R.T.
N1 - Funding Information:
Dr. Onufer is supported by the National Institutes of Health (5T32DK077653-27). This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Association of Program Directors in Surgery
PY - 2019/11/1
Y1 - 2019/11/1
N2 - Objective: The Surgical Council on Resident Education (SCORE) web portal provides a uniform, comprehensive, competency-based curriculum for general surgery residents. One of SCORE's principal founding goals was to provide equal opportunity for access of educational resources at programs across the United States which reported having a range of resources. We aimed to determine if there was a difference in portal usage by trainees in independent versus university programs, and across geographic areas. Methods: Using analytic software, we measured SCORE usage by trainees in 246 subscribing programs from August 2015 to March 2017. The primary outcome was the average duration of SCORE use per login. Secondary outcomes were the geographic region of each program, and university versus independent designation. Encounters lasting >8 hours (comprising 7% of the data set) were excluded to eliminate the likelihood of failure to log off the portal. Results: Over the study period, there were 669,501 SCORE sessions with 22% of these lasting 1 to 5 minutes, 33% lasting 6 to 30 minutes, and 28% lasting 31 to 120 minutes. Between the university (64.4% of encounters) and independent (35.6% of encounters) program types, there was no significant difference in average visit length overall, or in the normally-distributed designated time categories (t test -1.0, p = 0.3). When mean encounter length per program was compared by geographic regions, there was also no difference in the three time categories (ANOVA p = 0.9, 0.2, and 0.5, respectively). Conclusions: Most (50%) of SCORE encounters lasted 30 minutes of less, confirming prior work that shows trainees use the portal in relatively short bursts of activity. While there were more encounters from university program trainees (proportional with their greater numbers), the mean duration of an individual encounter did not significantly differ by program type as a whole or by region. These results suggest that SCORE is an equally accessible educational resource and is used by surgical trainees, regardless of program type or geographic region.
AB - Objective: The Surgical Council on Resident Education (SCORE) web portal provides a uniform, comprehensive, competency-based curriculum for general surgery residents. One of SCORE's principal founding goals was to provide equal opportunity for access of educational resources at programs across the United States which reported having a range of resources. We aimed to determine if there was a difference in portal usage by trainees in independent versus university programs, and across geographic areas. Methods: Using analytic software, we measured SCORE usage by trainees in 246 subscribing programs from August 2015 to March 2017. The primary outcome was the average duration of SCORE use per login. Secondary outcomes were the geographic region of each program, and university versus independent designation. Encounters lasting >8 hours (comprising 7% of the data set) were excluded to eliminate the likelihood of failure to log off the portal. Results: Over the study period, there were 669,501 SCORE sessions with 22% of these lasting 1 to 5 minutes, 33% lasting 6 to 30 minutes, and 28% lasting 31 to 120 minutes. Between the university (64.4% of encounters) and independent (35.6% of encounters) program types, there was no significant difference in average visit length overall, or in the normally-distributed designated time categories (t test -1.0, p = 0.3). When mean encounter length per program was compared by geographic regions, there was also no difference in the three time categories (ANOVA p = 0.9, 0.2, and 0.5, respectively). Conclusions: Most (50%) of SCORE encounters lasted 30 minutes of less, confirming prior work that shows trainees use the portal in relatively short bursts of activity. While there were more encounters from university program trainees (proportional with their greater numbers), the mean duration of an individual encounter did not significantly differ by program type as a whole or by region. These results suggest that SCORE is an equally accessible educational resource and is used by surgical trainees, regardless of program type or geographic region.
KW - Curriculum
KW - Educational resources
KW - Medical Knowledge
KW - Practice-Based Learning and Improvement
KW - Resident education
KW - SCORE
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85074873352&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.jsurg.2019.07.009
DO - 10.1016/j.jsurg.2019.07.009
M3 - Article
C2 - 31395521
AN - SCOPUS:85074873352
SN - 1931-7204
VL - 76
SP - e146-e151
JO - Journal of Surgical Education
JF - Journal of Surgical Education
IS - 6
ER -