In January 2015, the American Board of Surgery (ABS) agreed to fund a multi-institutional research study to test the SIMPL application as a real-time assessment tool for intraoperative performance of General Surgery residents. PLSC was able to recruit a total of 14 programs across the United States to participate, and the data collection phase of the trial ended in December 2016.

On Thursday, 4/20/2017 Dr Brian George, representing PLSC, shared the main findings of the trial with the ABS Executive committee. The results are thought provoking and suggest that even though our current way of educating general surgeons leads to overall acceptable results, it seems time to rethink some of the fundamentals how this education is currently structured. Members of the ABS were impressed by the large amount of data that were collected and by the sophistication of the data analysis.