Beyond requirements: residency management through the Internet.

HYPOTHESIS An Internet application could collect information to satisfy documentation required by the Residency Review Committee. Beyond replacing a difficult and inefficient paper system, it would collect, process, and distribute information to administration, faculty, and residents. DESIGN Descriptive study. SETTING An integrated residency of 18 services at a university teaching hospital with 4 affiliated institutions. PARTICIPANTS Residency administrators, faculty, and residents. INTERVENTIONS The application included a procedure recorder, resident evaluation of faculty and rotations, goals and objectives (stratified by service and resident level), and matching faculty evaluation of residents with these goals as competencies. Policies, schedules, research opportunities, clinical site information, and curriculum support were created. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Degree of compliance with Residency Review Committee standards, number of deficiencies corrected, and quantity and quality of information available to administration, faculty, and residents. RESULTS The Internet system increased resident compliance for faculty and rotation evaluations from 20% and 34%, respectively, to 100%, which was maintained for 22 months. These evaluations can be displayed individually, in summary grids, and as postgraduate year-specific averages. Faculty evaluations of residents can be reviewed throughout the system. The defined category report for procedures, which had deficiencies in the preceding 6 years, had none for the last 2 years. The Internet application provides Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education-validated operative logs to regulatory agencies. CONCLUSIONS A Web-based system can satisfy requirements and provide processed data that are of better quality and more complete than our paper system. We are now able to use scarce time and personnel to nurture developing surgical residents instead of shuffling paper.