Assessment of Required Clinical Experiences and the Electronic Patient Encounter Log

1. Hospital Oversight

A clerkship director or faculty member reviews and evaluates students’ logs as part of the mid-core and final assessment. During the mid-core formative evaluation the faculty member can comment on the completeness of the log and also ascertain whether students are seeing a variety of clinical patient encounters.   Students with relatively insufficient entries are  either  not involved in   the rotation or did not take the log  assignment seriously.  In either case, such deficiencies may impact the grade students receive in Professional Behavior. Since students are responsible for answering questions about the entries in their log, students should not log cases they have not seen and studied. The clinical faculty and departments can use the collective data in the students’ logs to evaluate their own program and the extent it offers students an appropriate clinical experience.

2. Central Oversight

Because of its web-based structure, all entries into the log are electronically submitted to the school and reviewed in the Office of the Dean. The Office of the Dean collects, collates and analyzes logs from all of the students and uses this data in two ways:

1. To monitor and evaluate the clinical experience at different hospitals. In this way, the central administration of the school will be able to answer questions, for example, “Have all of our students seen appendicitis? Have they all seen a patient with schizophrenia? Do all of our affiliated hospitals expose our students to end-of-life issues? Are all students involved in communication with children and parents?” With the data from these logs we can document for ourselves, the faculty and the student body that all of our clinical training sites provide relevant and comparable patient experiences.
2. To review the patient log of every clinical student that has completed their clerkship year. Students who have gaps in their clinical experience can be identified. This has been made possible by asking each of the clinical departments to provide quantified criteria for the types of patients on the “must see list”. The Office of the Dean will then notify students identified in this way and point out the deficiencies in their clinical experience. Students will then be required to correct this deficiency by scheduling an appropriate 4^th year elective.