General Surgery Resident Use of Electronic Resources: 15 Minutes a Day

General surgery resident performance on the American Board of Surgery In-Service Training Exam (ABSITE) has been used to predict American Board of Surgery (ABS) passage rates, selection for remediation programs, and ranking of fellowship applicants. We sought to identify electronic resource study habits of general surgery residents associated with successful test scores.

A single-institution, retrospective review of general surgery resident use of 2 electronic study resources, Surgical Council on Resident Education (SCORE) and TrueLearn (TL), were evaluated for the 7 months before the 2019 ABSITE. Metrics included TL question performance, SCORE use, and a survey about other reading sources. These metrics were evaluated in 3 ABSITE percentile groupings: ≥80^th, 31^st to 79^th, and ≤30^th.

The ≥80^th and 31^st to 79^th percentile groups scored higher on TL questions, at 69% and 67.7%, respectively, compared with 61.4% for the ≤30^th percentile group (p < 0.03). The ≥80^th percentile group spent on average 14.6 minutes/day on SCORE compared with 5.0 minutes/day and 4.7 minutes/day for the 31^st to 79^th and ≤30^th percentile groups, respectively (p < 0.04). The ≥80^th percentile group spent 34.8 minutes/session (77 sessions) compared with 19.2 minutes/session (49 sessions) and 20.7 minutes/session (43 sessions) in the 31^st to 79^th and ≤30^th percentile groups, respectively (p = 0.009).

Our nomogram incorporates time spent accessing an electronic content-based resource, SCORE, and performance on an electronic question-based resource as a novel method to provide individualized feedback and predict future ABSITE performance.