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Competency-Based Medical Education

How CBME Works

Residency programs have traditionally been time-based meaning that learners spend defined amounts of time in each phase of their training and all learners move through training at the same pace. With CBME the emphasis moves away from units of time and towards demonstration of competence. As learners demonstrate they’ve achieved competency in the clinical tasks and activities expected of them, they move through established learner stages. Entrustable professional activities and milestones drive the assessments used to determine learner competence.  Elentra’s CBME module allows programs to specify their milestones and EPAs, and link assessment forms to this criteria.  The system includes ways to track leaner progress, link faculty advisors with specific learners, increase learner’s ability to gauge their own performance, and more.

EPAs and Milestones

Entrustable professional activities are the clinical tasks that ultimately will be entrusted to learners to carry out independently. Different learner stages have different EPAs and once a learner demonstrates competency in each required EPA they can be promoted to the next stage. Milestones are embedded within each EPA to serve as checkpoints of meaningful progression, and multiple milestones may apply to a single EPA. Elentra’s CBME module allows programs to upload specific EPAs and map those to relevant milestones and assessment criteria. Visual curriculum maps let users see how EPAs and milestones are linked and view the detailed components of each EPA. This complex data architecture facilitates the dynamic generation of EPA-specific assessment tools in real time.

Assessment

Competency-based medical education relies on regular assessment to determine a learner’s progress across milestones, EPAs, and learner stages. Elentra’s CBME module incorporates features of the existing assessment and evaluation module to allow for frequent point of encounter assessments. Form templates allow quick and easy creation of assessment forms that can be initiated by a learner, faculty member, or department administrator. Upon completion, the data from these forms is immediately available to learners, academic advisors, program directors and competence committees. This regular, timely feedback is a powerful tool to improve a learner’s ability to self-monitor, and provides a detailed record for faculty to facilitate enhanced performance monitoring. From the CBME learner dashboard, users can quickly see how many assessments have been completed for specific EPAs, view completion of EPAs or stages, note trends in learner performance, and apply filters across various categories in order to get a more precise view of a learner’s progress. Additional features like pinning assessment forms or comments for later review, and a meeting log help promote meaningful reflection and discussion between learners and faculty.

Benefits

The goal of CBME is to improve the educational experience and in turn help better prepare physicians.  A competency-based curriculum provides for individualized learning, increased flexibility, innovative assessments, meaningful feedback and increased preparedness for practice.  Entrada allows learners, teachers and program administrators to easily access and manage the complex data and tools needed to make CBME a reality.