Multiyear experience with mobile online platform for documentation of acute care surgery fellows supervision

BACKGROUND: There is currently no standard for documenting supervision of acute care surgery (ACS) fellows. To accomplish this goal, we de-veloped a web-based survey that is accessible via mobile platform. We hypothesize that our mobile access survey is an effective, reproducible tool for assessing fellow clinical performance. METHODS: A retrospective review from 2016 to 2022 of all data captured in an encrypted database on all ACS fellows at our institution was performed. Supervision was defined as: Type 1 direct face-to-face, Type 2a immediately available in-house, Type 2b available after notification via phone with remote electronic medical record access, and Type 3 retrospective review. Data were collected by su-pervising faculty using a web-based clinical performance survey created by fellowship program leadership. Survey data collected included clinical summary, trainee, proctoring faculty, clinical service, operative/nonoperative, supervision type, Zwisch autonomy scale, time to input data, and graduate medical education milestone performance. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. RESULTS: A total of 883 proctoring events were identified, including the majority as Type 1 (97.4%). Trauma comprised 64% of evaluations. Fifty-two percent of the proctoring events were surgical cases. Complexity was graded as average (77%), hardest (16%), basic (7%). Guidance included supervision only, 491 of 666 (74%), with 26% requiring faculty intervention. Fellow performance was graded as average (66%), above average (31%), and below average/critical deficiency (3%). Graduate medical education perfor-mance was available for 247 of 883 interactions identifying 31 events with potential for improvement. Average evaluation comple-tion time: 2 minutes (n = 134). CONCLUSION: A mobileweb-based survey is a convenient and reliable tool for documenting ACS fellow clinical activity and was effectively used by all ACS faculty to record supervision. A combination of clinical and objective data is useful to determine ACS fellows' performance and to provide targeted education and remediation. Copyright (c) 2022 American Association for the Surgery of Trauma.