Enhancing Emergency Medicine Resident Education: A Weekly Education Series to Augment Electrocardiogram Education

This electrocardiogram (ECG) curriculum was designed for residents of all levels.

The curriculum runs over 1.5 years and is repeated, so that there will be repetition during a resident's training.

Electrocardiogram interpretation is a vital skill for emergency physicians. Formal ECG education in emergency medicine (EM) often consists of a few conference lectures, with the majority of education relegated to the clinical environment. However, this often leaves significant gaps in education, as a full curriculum cannot be implemented within limited conference time.

The goals of the curriculum were to establish an asynchronous ECG curriculum to help improve standardization of EM resident education, expose EM residents to a more comprehensive ECG curriculum, increase active learning in this arena, and decrease the administrative burden while not dedicating further conference time towards ECG education.

The educational strategies used in this curriculum include weekly case emails with instructional content located on a Google Site. These were added to conference lectures that were standard ECG education prior to this initiative. The first year of the augmented curriculum added only the weekly ECG emails with a follow-up answer email, and the website was created for the second year of curriculum implementation.

The educational content was assessed by the learners via a survey to gauge resident satisfaction as well as level of engagement and barriers to use. Additionally, the content was assessed via resident testing at the end of their second year so that they had completed a complete cycle of the curriculum.

The asynchronous curriculum improved resident test scores with the addition of the weekly emails from an average of 70% and pass rate of 58% to 82% and 92%, respectively (p=0.012). The addition of the informational website did not further improve scores, though it decreased variation in scores. The residents found the curriculum useful for their education.

Curriculum implementation was successful to improve on resident ECG education, both in terms of objective testing as well as resident feedback. It is a sustainable curriculum with methodology that requires little faculty time after setup; the maintenance required for the curriculum mostly consists of updating resident contacts as classes graduate. However, the setup time was significant; despite this, the authors believe this is a time-effective method of educational programming given the little ongoing time requirements.

Electrocardiogram, curriculum development.