Presented By: Piper Cramer, Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine
Co-Authors: Peter Vollbrecht, Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine

Purpose
Communication is recognized as a critical skill for physicians yet it remains challenging to teach and evaluate. One difficulty is evaluating intervention effectiveness. Currently, the field largely relies on self-reported confidence as a measure of intervention success. If used, objective evaluation tools for examining communication skills in medical students are often built for a specific event, making it difficult to measure progress longitudinally. Here, we introduce a rubric developed intentionally to be used in a range of situations including outreach, medical education, and patient encounters. 

Methods
Researchers examined a number of communication rubrics across a range of academic fields and for use in a variety of settings including OSCEs, undergraduate science and communication courses, and foundational medical education. Using existing tools as inspiration we created a rubric applicable to a variety of settings and therefore capable of longitudinal monitoring of student progression.. The validation process for this survey is ongoing and is meant to ensure that collected data and evaluator interpretation of the rubric is consistent. To do this, three short clips of different foundational sciences lectures are evaluated by a set of 4 individuals. All rubric scores are then compared and discussed during a focus session. Further validation is ongoing as the rubric is used to evaluate student communication skills during outreach events. This process uses a 360 evaluation with the rubric being completed by the student, by the teacher, and a faculty member. 

Results AND Conclusions
Following successful rubric validation, we hope this tool can be used to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of communication skills interventions. While developed with medical students in mind, we hope that this rubric will be utilized more broadly to effectively evaluate communication skills. This tool will provide a less subjective measure of intervention effectiveness, moving us beyond participants' self-reported communication confidence.