It’s not easy being a residency program director, especially when everything is new. Just ask Dustin Beck, DO, program director of the Cherokee Nation Family Medicine Residency Program. He joined his rural program in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, in 2021.
“We were in our second year of initial accreditation, so we had multiple site visits,” Dr. Beck said in a webinar produced by the Rural Residency Planning and Development Technical Assistance Center. “Those take an exorbitant amount of time to prepare for. I had to learn what documents and things I needed. And if I didn't have them, I needed to create them.”
Key among this early work was making sure the program was meeting the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Common Program Requirements, a basic set of standards in training and preparing residents and fellows.
“Not only did we have to demonstrate how residents had achieved competency in all these core competencies, but we also had to provide teaching and education within each of these,” he said.
Then he discovered the AMA GME Competency Education Program, which delivers education to help institutions more easily meet ACGME common program requirements. Its offerings include more than 50 courses that residents can access online through their residency program’s subscription, on their own schedules. The program also features six faculty development courses.
The AMA GME Competency Education Program’s modules cover five of the six topics within the core competency requirements: patient care, practice-based learning and improvement, interpersonal and communication skills, professionalism and system-based practice. The sixth requirement, medical knowledge, is one that is typically addressed during clinical education.
Program subscribers have access to award-winning online education designed for residents on the go. It’s easy to use and saves time with simple tracking and reporting tools for administrators. Learn more.
It’s about pain relief
“Whenever I sat down and considered this, my thought was: Well, I could just create some presentations and I could show them my didactics calendar, and then I've got different lectures scheduled within each of these core competencies throughout the year,” Dr. Beck said, noting that he quickly had to abandon that plan.
“Within each of these core competencies are a series of milestones. Some may have as few as a couple. Many have multiple—four or five, sometimes more,” he said.
He realized he would probably need four to six lectures for each competency, meaning he would likely need upwards of 30 presentations.
“There's no way I could have done it,” he said. “I was trying to find the way that I could hit the ‘easy button.’ How could I accomplish what ACGME wanted me to accomplish for my program, but making it as straightforward, easy, painless as possible on myself?”
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Why it works
It wasn’t just the AMA GME Competency Education Program’s time savings that appealed to Dr. Beck.
“Compared to some of the things that I purchased for our residency over the years … this was a very cost-effective benefit,” Dr. Beck said, adding that he likes its customizability. “If you really wanted to make it straightforward for your program, they have predesigned a curricula for PGY-1, -2, -3 and beyond residents, depending on your specialty. But if you want to do a custom build for the modules to embed them within certain PGY years, you can do that.”
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Dr. Beck also shared what’s in his custom course library, why he assigns modules both synchronously and asynchronously, and how he tailored curricula to each year of residency.
“Most of the run times are between 15 to 20 minutes,” he said. “So each individual one does not take a ton of time for a resident to complete."
He also highlighted modules developed specifically for faculty development.
“It makes it pretty easy to accomplish that as well,” he said.
Easy to track progress
Residency program directors have access to dashboards and reports that provide a view of progress at the program and institution levels. In addition, customizable reports make it easy to track learner performance and demonstrate compliance for accreditation.
The AMA GME Competency Education Program covers topics including well-being, QI and patient safety, residents as teachers, navigating health systems, health equity, professionalism and faculty development. Schedule a meeting to discuss your organization’s needs
