Baylor residents will soon have access to a new educational resource to help them meet milestones in ethics, professionalism and health policy.

The new tool, called the Ethics, Professionalism and Policy Program, or EP3, is a multi-modal education program to help residents achieve the standards of the ACGME Next Accreditation System. The NAS is the new way that residents are assessed for competency throughout their training and determined to be ready to graduate.

EP3 combines e-modules and live engagement sessions in a curriculum that can be tailored by specialty and meets residents’ specific needs, particularly their time constraints.

Dr. Nathan Allen

“This is a unique tool, both at Baylor and in graduate medical education generally,” said Dr. Nathan Allen, assistant professor of medicine and medical ethics and director of the EP3 program. “It will allow us to formalize the resident teaching component of Baylor’s Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy while also addressing the requirements of the Next Accreditation System.”

Allen developed the curriculum, working closely with the Office of Graduate Medical Education, the Office of the Provost, and residency program leadership at Baylor. Residents will complete three hours of e-modules and three hours of live-engagement sessions per program year, although there are no deadlines by which to complete the components.

The video modules can be streamed on a phone or other device or will be available as a podcast, offering convenience to residents. About 30 modules are currently under development, dealing with introductory topics related to ethics, professionalism and health policy.

The live engagement sessions will build on the e-modules by offering case-based learning, discussion sessions and other techniques that allow for resident participation. They will be led by residency program faculty and faculty from the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy.

The NAS requires a lot of new effort by residents and their program directors to demonstrate competency in different domains, but one thing it doesn’t offer is the resources to help them get there.

“This new system not only provides educational resources to residents but offers the measurement tools that faculty will need to rate their trainees in skills and competencies related to ethics, policy and professionalism,” Allen said.

The program is being introduced in the departments of emergency medicine, radiology and neurology and will soon expand to neurosurgery, urology and orthopedics.

Dr. Bobby Kapur, associate professor of medicine and the emergency medicine residency program director, said the new program will be beneficial.

“The NAS promotes an evaluation system that is very robust. For emergency medicine, we have 23 milestones that need to be assessed for each of our 42 residents twice a year. That culminates into 1,932 data points we need to evaluate annually. EP3 allows us to provide training and assessment for Systems-Based Practice and Professionalism milestones that may be more difficult to evaluate than the traditional Medical Knowledge and Clinical Skills proficiencies. In addition, the EP3 provides web-based training that helps our busy residents complete the modules at their time and pace. We look forward to utilizing the EP3 program to implement the NAS Milestones project for EM at Baylor.”

– Dr. Bobby Kapur

For more information about EP3, contact John Antonio, lead project coordinator at John.Antonio@bcm.edu.