Would Our Procedural Competence in Medicine Stand Up to the Same Level of Scrutiny as … a Hockey Goalie?

Editor’s Note: This post is one of two pieces on the topic of procedural competence. Read the other piece here. By: Martin Pusic, MD, PhD, assistant professor, Emergency Medicine, and director, Division of Learning Analytics, New York University School of Medicine Institute for Innovations in Medical Education, New York, New York. When I read Vaisman and Cram’s thoughtful Perspective on academic faculty procedural competence, I agreed with most of what they had to say. Academic faculty are certainly having to adapt to a myriad of dislocations as our health systems adapt to new realities. What doesn’t change is the buck stops with the academic attending, which can be problematic for all the reasons they list. However, there is one facet of their argument with which I take a different perspective and that is the idea that there is a paucity of data on procedural success. Anyone who has done a procedure note in a modern electronic health record (EHR) knows that the data is available and in spades. This will only increase given that the incorporation of digital photos and videos is only a matter of time—why would I write down “we used 1% xylocaine without epinephrine to locally infiltrate the laceration” when my head camera can easily stream this to the EHR? Sure there are issues to be worked out, but soon we’ll be swimming in all the data we could possibly want about our procedural successes or lack thereof. What will we do with all this procedural data? That’s ...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective big data deliberate practice faculty procedural competency Source Type: blogs