Purpose
Medical schools offering diverse curricular tracks and clerkship models often face challenges in ensuring comparability across programs. At Texas A&M College of Medicine, we addressed these challenges by developing interactive visual dashboards that integrate data from various educational tracks and clerkship models.
Methods
Texas A&M College of Medicine offers two educational tracks: (a) Regular and (b) Engineering Medicine (EnMed), as well as two clerkship models: (a) Traditional Block Clerkships (TBC) and (b) A&M Integrated Medicine (AIM), a longitudinal integrated clerkship. The Office of Evaluation and Assessment creates comprehensive visual dashboards for each course within these tracks and clerkship models. These dashboards integrate aggregate data from multiple sources, including student performance grades, course evaluation data, qualitative feedback, course director summaries, student insights, and future action plans.
Results
Visual dashboards allow stakeholders to compare educational outcomes and competencies across tracks, clerkship models, and academic years. These tools provide insights into student performance, milestone readiness, residency preparation, curriculum design, and resource allocation, supporting evidence-based decision-making and improvement. For example, the Pediatrics clerkship dashboard, which included the AY 23-24 national NBME average, showed that two out of five campuses scored below the national average. This led clerkship directors to investigate and create an action plan to address the gap.
Conclusions
Interactive visual dashboards have the potential to revolutionize medical education by providing an effective solution to ensure that all students, regardless of their chosen track or clerkship model, receive a consistent and high-quality education. These dashboards make real-time information accessible to all stakeholders and facilitate straightforward comparisons across educational tracks and clerkship models, allowing educators to quickly identify and address any discrepancies or gaps. This innovative approach can serve as a model for other institutions, promoting continuous quality improvement and enhancing the effectiveness of medical education.