A Call to Action From the California Consortium for the Assessment of Clinical Competence: Making the Case for...

The discontinuation of the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 2 Clinical Skills Examination emphasizes the need for other reliable standardized assessments of medical student clinical skills. For 30 years, the California Consortium for the Assessment of Clinical Competence (CCACC) has collaborated in the development of clinical skills assessments and has become a valuable resource for clinicians, standardized patient educators, psychometricians, and medical educators. There are many merits to strong multi-institutional partnerships, including the integration of data across multiple schools to provide feedback to both students and curricula, pooled test performance statistics for analysis and quality assurance, shared best practices and resources, individual professional development, and opportunities for research and scholarship. The infrastructure of the CCACC allows member schools to adapt to a changing medical landscape, from emerging trends in clinical medicine to the limitations imposed by a global pandemic. In the absence of a national examination, there is now a greater need for all medical schools to develop a comprehensive, dynamic, and psychometrically sound assessment that accurately evaluates clinical skills. Medical schools working together in regional consortia have the opportunity to create and implement innovative and robust assessments that evaluate a wide range of clinical skills, ensure that medical students have met an expected level of clinical competency before graduation, and provide a framework that contributes to ongoing efforts for the development of new national clinical skills standards.