EQIP 2023-2025: Increased Usability and Sustainability

To describe the collaborative efforts that improved the Educational Quality Improvement Program (EQIP) between 2023 and 2025.

EQIP was formed by the Association of Program Directors in Surgery (APDS) in 2018 as a continuous educational quality improvement program. After a successful proof-of-concept completed in 2021 to 2022, EQIP's underlying infrastructure was transitioned to the Society for Improving Medical Professional Learning (SIMPL). A data-ingestion process and reporting platform were iteratively developed over 2 years in collaboration with participating programs. User-centered design strategies were used to develop both data-ingestion and reporting tools.

Ten surgical training programs provided design ideas and iterative feedback on data upload and reporting processes.

EQIP was sustainably strengthened in the 2023 to 2025 academic years. Data from the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the American Board of Surgery (ABS), and the Electronic Resident Application Service (ERAS) were merged with manually entered data for 36 programs. Feedback from participating programs emphasized the ease of the data upload process. Previously documented challenges with identifying trainees across different transition points (e.g., UME to GME) and between organizations were experienced. Lastly, an additional emphasis around allowing program directors to explore their own data was identified. While a founding premise of EQIP was to generate benchmark data that individual programs could use to set goals, additional data analysis and reporting needs around understanding trainees across multiple data points were identified.

The APDS, in partnership with SIMPL, demonstrated that a secure database to support continuous quality improvement in surgical education can be successfully deployed. EQIP will continue to improve and hopes to increase the number of programs who can participate in iterative, collaborative improvement work.