Crowdsourcing to Assess Surgical Skill.

What Is the Innovation? Surgical skills impactpatientoutcomes.1Ourprofessionneedsmethods that accurately and objectively evaluate surgical skills.2 These methodsmustprovidetimelyandmeaningful feedback,minimizereviewtimeburden,andscaleforwidespreaduse.Thisevaluationhurdle may be overcome by leveraging crowdsourcing to help triage outliers and focus improvement efforts. Crowdsourcing is the process of using largegroupsofdecentralized, independentpeopleprovidingaggregatedfeedback.3Crowdsourcingtoassesssurgicalskill isamethod bywhichsurgical techniquecanbeassessedbycrowdsof reviewers, some of whom are nonmedically trained. Crowdsourcing has enjoyed broad success in health care—discovering protein-folding patterns, assisting disabled patients, locating automatic defibrillators within cities, and annotating electronicmedical records.3