The ACGME Milestone Project in ophthalmology

The ACGME is moving towards the next generation of accreditation in the USA called the Next Accreditation System (NAS). The NAS is anticipated to reduce the burden on programs to comply with accreditation requirements; to produce meaningful, innovative, and continuous benchmark outcomes data; to use ongoing individual and programmatic milestones to judge performance; and ultimately to produce better trained residents, to improve the quality of care, to reduce health care costs and health care disparities, and to provide objective evidence to the public and other external stakeholders of the quality of graduate medical education across the specialties of medicine. We describe the ACGME milestone development process for ophthalmology. If successful, the NAS will benefit all programs by reducing the programmatic burden and paperwork; increasing accreditation cycle length; and improving all programs through formative and summative feedback.