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Highlights

Challenges

• Reliance on Microsoft Excel to track student performance
• Desire to review performance in competencies, categories over time. (i.e. NBME results, clerkship course, and performance outcomes)

Solutions

• Implementing Analytics by Acuity Insights to integrate data
• Dashboards for student grades and NBME exam results

Results

• Matched pass/fail expectations and thresholds to requirements, created reports for review of their borderline students
• Results are available weekly instead of waiting for end of cycle

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Deep dive

Offering one of the largest medical education programs in the United States, this research-intensive medical institution regularly ranks among the top 15 U.S. medical schools for graduate success in academic medicine and biomedical research. Its National Institutes of Health research funding consistently ranks amongst the highest in the nation. Over 9,000 of its alumni are among the nation’s foremost clinicians, biomedical scientists, and medical educators.

Searching for a better way to track performance

Maintaining this level of excellence across decades is not easy. It requires a commitment to deliver educational excellence, and an institutional culture unwilling to rest on its laurels. It may be surprising to know that the school’s professors relied on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to track student performance. “At the end of each year we used Excel and every student had a page […] then we exported everything into a big spreadsheet,” said its Associate Professor of Pediatrics. “It was time consuming. I am not good at Excel so I had to get my daughter to help.” 

Data in multiple locations make trends and analysis cumbersome and slow

A reliance on Microsoft Excel is but one example of how traditional, old-school practices of information management threatened this institution’s ability to remain a medical education standard bearer. Like many other medical schools, they were also storing data in disparate, siloed places. While Student Affairs is responsible for individual student data, the Office of Medical Education is responsible for aggregate data and insights for program improvement. All this data, in different places, compiled on different schedules for different people, made finding insights or critical trends nearly impossible. Analyzing the big picture was a slow, cumbersome process, susceptible to error and time intensive. 

For a school that hoped to move to higher order outcomes overall for its students when it came to performance, competencies, NBME results and clerkship courses, this leading medical school needed to re-examine how they collected and organized their data.  

“I wished I could have a report for each student that showed how they did for each clerkship. I had to pull each one manually,” said their Office of Student Affairs.

Centralizing data converts six-week wait time down to weekly updates

Analytics entered the picture and built a brand new digital dashboard that amalgamated all of the critical data into one centralized place. This new tool made gathering, splicing, and interpreting data easier. The dashboard matched pass/fail expectations and thresholds to the school’s requirements, created reports for review for borderline students, and displayed a student’s performance longitudinally from pre-clinical through clinical stages. 

Today, Student Affairs is able to monitor individual student grades, NBME exam results, and more weekly as they come in, rather than the previous six-week cycle. The dashboard completely eliminates the previous, manual nature of the task and saves time by displaying performance trends in an easy to interpret manner. 

Data solution that leads to faster results and more insights

By optimizing their information management system with Analytics and adopting new approaches to data warehousing and data automation, this leading school has given itself an advantage over other medical education institutions. They’re now able to know more – about their students, exams and curriculum performance – faster. It’s the kind of advantage that will allow this College of Medicine to sustain its reputation for academic excellence for decades to come. 

If you’d like to meet with a member of our team to see firsthand how Analytics can help your medical school, book a demo.