In previous sessions, we've learned about methods and strategies for assessment and feedback for our trainees. In this session, we will highlight some of the practical tools and resources that are available online to help you with assessment and evaluation. But first, let's have some vocabulary reminders for the measuring sticks that we use for our trainees. Previously, we learned about EPA's Entrustable Professional Activities and Milestones and how these are tied to competency-based evaluation. But as a reminder, the EPA, the activity, describes the work being done. The competency describes the physician doing the work. And the milestones are stages in the development of a specific competence. As Program Director, it's your job to ensure that the Clinical Competency Committee, the CCC, or the CCCC, reports on these competencies via a milestone-based evaluation to the ABIM every six months. Currently, there's no formal requirement to report EPAs separately from milestone-based competency evaluation. Instead, it's trusted that the CCC will incorporate the EPAs into their evaluation. Here is an example of the ABIM report that you will submit for each fellow every six months. This report can be found at the website shown on the top. And here you see that each competency is evaluated in a milestone-based fashion. And you will have to fill this out for each of your fellows. So now, we want to show you some of the assessment and evaluation resources related to this milestone-based evaluation, which are available on the ACC website. First, you need to navigate to the Fellowship Program Tools website by typing it into the search bar on the ACC homepage. The first link, which pops up, takes you to this valuable website. Now, this website has resources dealing with many aspects of a Fellowship Program. The idea is that we don't want each Program Director to have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we have gathered this group of resources. And today, we're going to focus specifically on the assessment tools available on this website. Now, if you want to talk specifically about milestone-based evaluation, you can open this tab, the ACC Templates Best Practices. Here you will find curated milestone-based evaluations for the standard general cardiology fellowship rotations. Now, the evaluations in this tab focus on the seven core competencies and do not include subcompetency evaluation questions. These ones are already formatted for new innovations, and they can be easily adapted to whichever online evaluation website you use. If you are interested in directly copying them into new innovations, you can access the instructions here under Accessing New Innovation Evaluation Templates. Now, for example, let's look at the curated echo evaluation template. Now, you'll see that for each competency, you have specific language for that rotation, in this case for echo slash imaging. You also find corresponding milestone-based evaluation instructions. So, these templates help faculty who aren't familiar with milestone-based evaluation to simply read the description and decide which level the fellow is at. So, here you see patient care and procedural skills and the description at level three that the fellow can safely perform and interpret basic TTE examinations, but that the fellow inconsistently recognizes appropriate indications and or high-risk findings. Now, also available in this toolkit are expanded milestone-based evaluations by rotation. If you go to this tab, Evaluation of Fellows by Rotation, you'll find some longer evaluations. Let's say that you want to evaluate some of the subcompetencies that are specific to echo. Well, here you'll find examples of these more granular rotation-specific evaluation. Let's examine this echo rotation evaluation created by our colleagues at Geisinger. As an example, you'll see that the subcompetency patient care 4b is evaluated at least twice, here asking for about the specific skill that the fellow can independently acquire the complete transthoracic exam, but the next item under evaluating the fellow's ability to assess ventricular size and function. There is a host of other questions here on this more lengthy evaluation. Now, also available on this website are curated EPA documents. Remember that there is no formal requirement to report on EPAs, but the documents here under EPAs rotation-specific define the EPAs by rotation. These can be very useful for your clinical competency committee when you're evaluating the fellows semi-annually. These EPAs can also be circulated to faculty to help set expectations for the fellows. Let's look at the EPA document for nuclear cardiology. Now, here you'll see a list of the entrustable professional activities, as well as references in bold to the competencies or subcompetency that that EPA relates to. If you want to be fancy, you can actually map and crosstalk between these EPAs and these competencies or subcompetencies. So again, for example, under nuclear, one of the expected activities that the resident slash fellow will be able to do is number six, appropriately integrate myocardial perfusion images with results of clinical and ECG portions of stress testing. So you see that these are very specific to the rotation and helpful when evaluating the fellow. So under simply this assessment tools tab, you have options for how you want to best assess your fellows. You can choose the short curated version under ACC templates. You can also choose the longer, more granular rotations evaluation of fellows by rotation. You can see EPAs that have already been written for each of the rotations, and you can use these in any combination as best suits your fellowship. Before we leave this website, I want to encourage you to take advantage of many of the other resources available. For example, there are curriculum tools and even curriculum documents that you can use to help when creating your own curricula. Perhaps you're working on faculty development. Well, here are some suggestions for how to help faculty become better teachers, how to give feedback to those faculty, and one that I personally enjoy, the safety and QI tab. Safety and QI are required portions of our training and fellowship, and here you find links to all sorts of resources so you don't have to come up with a safety curriculum all on your own. We hope that you'll take advantage of this website, whether it's the assessment tools or any of the other options, and also if you as a program director see a need for other resources and tools, please let us know because we would like to make this a useful online platform.

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ACC Fellowship Program Tools

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