BACKGROUND: Medicine is considered the noble profession. Physicians are held to higher standards of professionalism by the community. Unprofessional behavior is often the most challenging to deal with for program directors. One such behavior is the lack of sufficient conference attendance.
The Internal Medicine Residency Review Committee (RRC) mandates a minimum of 65% attendance at educational conferences for residents. Our residents attend between 8-10 hours of teaching conferences per week.
Previously, conference attendance was taken by Chief Medical Residents by one of two ways - paper sign-in and badge swiping. However, both techniques failed for the following reasons. The paper sign-in failed due to difficulty in transferring the data into an electronic format for analysis. The badge swiping technique failed due to the card reader not reading the hospital issued encrypted identity cards …show more content…
Another limitation was the time that is required to analyze the data. In addition, attendance was taken at the beginning of every conference session. Hence, if a resident did not stay for the entire conference or left the room after scanning his/her badge, that resident would still receive credit for attending the conference.
In the future we aim to create an app that has much of the data analysis algorithms built in as this would vastly minimize the time spent for data analysis and simplify the entire process.
CONCLUSION: Based on our experience, an attendance tracking system using QRCodes, XScanpet and Microsoft Excel was the most sophisticated and effective way of tracking conference attendance in our residency program, eliminating the failures of previous techniques. The minimal requirements and the easy availability of components make it a viable attendance tracking tool in all residency programs
The Internal Medicine Residency Review Committee (RRC) mandates a minimum of 65% attendance at educational conferences for residents. Our residents attend between 8-10 hours of teaching conferences per week.
Previously, conference attendance was taken by Chief Medical Residents by one of two ways - paper sign-in and badge swiping. However, both techniques failed for the following reasons. The paper sign-in failed due to difficulty in transferring the data into an electronic format for analysis. The badge swiping technique failed due to the card reader not reading the hospital issued encrypted identity cards …show more content…
Another limitation was the time that is required to analyze the data. In addition, attendance was taken at the beginning of every conference session. Hence, if a resident did not stay for the entire conference or left the room after scanning his/her badge, that resident would still receive credit for attending the conference.
In the future we aim to create an app that has much of the data analysis algorithms built in as this would vastly minimize the time spent for data analysis and simplify the entire process.
CONCLUSION: Based on our experience, an attendance tracking system using QRCodes, XScanpet and Microsoft Excel was the most sophisticated and effective way of tracking conference attendance in our residency program, eliminating the failures of previous techniques. The minimal requirements and the easy availability of components make it a viable attendance tracking tool in all residency programs