If your institution has multiple sites and campuses you know how challenging it can be to demonstrate comparability across sites. The process to report is onerous, pulling data from a variety of sources and then matching the data to the specific site or campus.
Part of the DCI (Data Collection Instrument) for your LCME accreditation requirements includes standard 8.7 “Comparability of Education/Assessment – a medical school ensures that the medical curriculum includes comparable education experiences and equivalent methods of assessment across all locations within a given course and clerkship to ensure all medical students achieve the same medical education program objectives.” But we know ease of access to gather, collate and sort through the required data across sites and campuses can be no small undertaking.
Showing how your SoM is meeting the standard, especially with multiple sites and campuses, isn’t straightforward without a robust approach to data standards and efficient reporting. But with the right systems in place, it does not have to be so complex.
Start with timely access
It’s important to have timely access to course and clerkship evaluations (both of the learners themselves and their learning experiences). Timely access means you’re able to be alerted, review and react quickly when issues arise from feedback from students on their learning experience. We know from consultations with Schools of Medicine that timely access to evaluation data for regular review is one of the first processes to address improving Continuous Quality Improvement efforts (CQI) and build a proactive review process. Prompt access to how students are evaluating their learning experiences, including across site and campus education powers the CQI cycle. While programs are collecting the data, the effort involved to organize the data means that most Schools of Medicine only report at the end of a course or clerkship – well after the opportunity has passed to proactively flag site or campus issues.
Compare the data you have across campuses or sites
A few examples of comparing data across campuses or site that can be a powerful assist in proactive reviewing performance of your curriculum:
- When reviewing exam results, no news is good news.
- With 2 or more campuses, no anomalies in reporting between campuses can mean less cause for concern or action.
- When there are differences, digging into the situation and finding conclusions about why is critical.
- When reviewing student feedback across sites, find solutions that can help you aggregate and sort the data for your corresponding sites and campuses easily.
- Being able to review a data point for all sites longitudinally can make flagging an isolated issue easier to spot.
- Sorting exam results and student feedback across sites and campuses within particular student groupings (i.e. admission type, MCAT score, etc.) can be a powerful addition to your review process and proactive planning.
- Reviewing data to identify if issues are occurring in a particular student group can help your program address required supports or adjustments for a particular segment of your student population.
Change in action
Recently we had the opportunity to work with Mercer School of Medicine who deliver their four-year M.D program to learners across 3 campuses. In their efforts to verify consistency across their campuses, the student affairs team and faculty must verify performance and filter reporting details across all sites.
By integrating data from a variety of sources including their matriculation data, ExamSoft, NBME® scores, grades and evaluation data from One45) the Mercer team has access to all of the required reporting data quickly and efficiently without the wait for manual report preparation. This has resulted in ease of access for their cross-campus comparaison and alerts for low performance scores to flag their team for review.
One especially important improvement for the team at Mercer was access to their NBME® data using the One45 Analytics dashboard. This view provides them added benefit of monitoring their students’ trends on NBME® scores longitudinally across their clerkships and across their different campuses quickly and efficiently without any manual manipulation.
See site and campus comparability reports in One45 Analytics
Improving your review process to incorporate faster access to the data you need is time well spent. Removing barriers and providing clarity on performance results across sites and campuses can help you quickly address problems before they become issues and provide the evidence you need on site comparability for your next LCME accreditation visit.
Want to learn more about how One45 Analytics can help you deliver easy reporting on site comparability and across campus assessment?
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