Knowing Your Team: Rapid Assessment of Residents and Fellows for Effective Horizontal Care Delivery in Emergency Events

Abstract

Background Horizontal care, in which clinicians assume roles outside of their usual responsibilities, is an important health care systems response to emergency situations. Allocating residents and fellows into skill-concordant clinical roles, however, is challenging. The most efficient method to accomplish graduate medical education (GME) assessment and deployment for horizontal care is not known. Objective We designed a categorization schema that can efficiently facilitate clinical and educational horizontal care delivery for trainees within a given institution. Methods In September 2019, as part of a general emergency response preparation, a 4-tiered system of trainee categorization was developed at one academic medical center. All residents and fellows were mapped to this system. This single institution model was disseminated to other institutions in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic began to affect hospitals nationally. In March 2020, a multi-institution collaborative launched the Trainee Pandemic Role Allocation Tool (TPRAT), which allows institutions to map institutional programs to COVID-19 roles within minutes. This was disseminated to other GME programs for use and refinement. Results The emergency response preparation plan was disseminated and selectively implemented with a positive response from the emergency preparedness team, program directors, and trainees. The TPRAT website was visited more than 100 times in the 2 weeks after its launch. Institutions suggested rapid refinements via webinars and e-mails, and we developed an online user's manual. Conclusions This tool to assess and deploy trainees horizontally during emergency situations appears feasible and scalable to other GME institutions.

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“…Dashboards have been widely used in medical education to track learner milestones, monitor continuous quality improvement, and help programs meet institutional goals and accreditation requirements ( 2 , 6 ). In recent years, health care systems have utilized disaster preparedness dashboards ( 2 , 7 ). Dennis and colleagues, for example, described a categorization schema to facilitate horizontal deployment of trainees in emergency situations ( 2 ).…”

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