For most of the working population in North America, August and September are usually delightful months spent on holiday or making plans to spend as much time as possible outside. For Schools of Medicine, this is MSPE crunch time. The annual process of creating Medical Student Performance Evaluations (MSPE) letters has been a painfully labour intensive process consuming months of time and effort to support each year’s cohort of medical students in successfully securing their desired residency opportunities.
But the digital transformation of medical schools has opened the door to a much more pleasant end to summer. The integration and centralization of MedEd data in a data warehouse enables automated batch processing of a cohort’s MSPE letter drafts saving Schools of Medicine the time, effort and errors involved with traditional MSPE creation. Those savings translate into opportunities for increased personalization of individual letters and the opportunity to increase match rates.
Reduce time looking for data necessary to create MSPEs
From speaking with our client schools, on average it takes two full time employees three months to complete the required batch of MSPE letters. The task of pulling out grades and narratives from the various systems of record and then copying and pasting them into letters is the biggest time spent by far. These steps often need to be repeated for letters as the data points change and are updated in disparate systems.
A data warehouse, once set up, eliminates data silos and time spent hunting through systems by automatically consolidating data into a single source database for reporting. The data warehouse will poll each of the integrated systems with a regularity that ensures letter drafts remain up-to-date and ready for review.
Reduce effort involved in building individual MSPEs
Having all data in one place for all students means you can now use automated tools (similar to a “mail-merge”) to pull the data and create large portions of your MPSE letter drafts. No more chasing down various people for inputs, copying and pasting info, then double and triple checking that you’ve not made errors throughout the process.
Significantly reducing the effort required to simply get to a first set of letter drafts opens the opportunities for Deans to redirect resources onto higher value tasks – whether that be the increased personalization of MSPE letters or other pressing initiatives within the department.
Reduce errors in MSPE data
The process of manual copy and paste from various sources comes with a significant cost of both time and quality. MSPE letters are at further risk of error due to changes or updates made to data in source systems after the information has been copied over to letter drafts.
When a data warehouse is in place, the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process does a certain amount of normalizing and cleansing as the data is integrated. This ensures that the data you are using is much more accurate. Also, when the data warehouse is set up, it is determined which system of record is the source of truth for individual pieces of data. This reduces the chance of accidentally using bad or conflicting data selected from the wrong system.
Errors due to out-of-date data become a thing of the past with a data warehouse because the warehouse polls source systems on a regular basis to ensure you are working with a complete and up-to-date data set. When the data in the warehouse is being pulled and then merged into your MSPE letter drafts, you can be confident you are working with up-to-date information. Better yet, as the letters are being personalized and refined, it simply takes a click of a button to once again refresh and ensure the data inputs are timely and accurate per the designated ultimate source of truth for those records.
Opportunity for deeper personalization of MSPE letters
The time and effort required to pull the data together for a cohort’s batch of MSPE letters does not usually leave room for added elements of personalization for each residency applicant’s letter.
When the burden of data collection leaves no time or limited capacity for letter personalization, schools run the risk of negative impacts to the overall residency match rates for students. Research shows that more detailed, nuanced MSPE letters that highlight students’ attributes, aptitudes, and experiences support better informed selection decisions by residency programs. Given the weight programs place on the importance of the MSPE, the ability to redirect time and capacity from data collection to letter personalization provides programs with the opportunity to increase match rates and successful outcomes for their students.
The dawning of a new day and brighter prospects for the MSPE process
With the digital transformation that has occurred in MedEd and the arrival of MedEd specific data warehouses, the annual MSPE generation process no longer needs to be the herculean effort it has been to-date. Data warehousing combined with strong data governance and cleansing policies will transform this process—reducing time, effort, and errors while opening the opportunity for schools to improve match rates and outcomes for students.
For further related reading, take a look at 6 Ways a Data Warehouse Can Supercharge your Medical School, Make (and keep) your MedEd data healthy – a treatment plan, and the product pages for One45’s data warehouse and MSPE letter generator.
The post The role of data warehouse in making MSPE easier appeared first on One45.