Translating Education Science into Evidence-Based Practice

The future of medical education is using assessment data to improve how we train the next generation of providers. Unfortunately, collecting, storing, and analyzing these data are challenging for individual programs. In the past 10 years, thousands of faculty and trainees have used the SIMPL assessment toolkit to improve assessment and feedback. At the same time, the SIMPLcollaborative network has used data from that assessment infrastructure to advance the science of medical education. Organized as a 501(c) 3 non-profit, the SIMPL collaborative now encompasses over 180 programs in 19 different specialties in 5 countries, all of whom share a common vision to support continuous improvement in the medical education system.

An early focus of SIMPL Collaborative was the development and launch of SIMPL OR: System for Improving and Measuring Procedural Learning, an evaluation system that uses smartphones to provide feedback for both residents and faculty. This technology makes it feasible to evaluate resident technical performance for every operation in which a resident participates.  It will also enable programs to characterize faculty teaching behaviors.  This project augments our ongoing research about how to ensure that resident education best meets the needs of patients today and into the future.

In addition to making improvements to SIMPL OR, we have expanded our focus to translate clinical-style quality improvement to medical education. Through research by Collaborative members, we have identified and quantified areas that can be largely impacted by quality improvement efforts. These efforts will get systematically investigated, and targeted efforts to make improvements are made by programs that are working to tackle these problems. If you are also tackling these problems and want to reach out, we would love to hear from you at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..