Objective assessment of surgical competence in a septoplasty model

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): To ensure patient safety, educators must train surgeons to set standards of competency, public health officials should put in place policies to ensure surgeons remain competent and surgeons should only perform surgeries that they are competent to perform. Measuring surgeon's technical skill is crucial part of determining if they are competent. Traditionally surgical skill is assessed most commonly during training using subjective non-validated metrics. This leads to variation in the definition of competency. Recent policies set forth by the Accreditation Council of Graduate Medical Education- the governing body for graduate medical education, mandate that technical skill be measured objectively. Currently, there are few valid objective measures available to measure technical competence. Our research will yield a set of tools and methodologies that can be deployed to across medical training programs to objectively measure surgical skill and competence. This platform is also capable of developing new objective measure of skill and competence. Specifically, first, we will develop an objective skills assessment platform, and establish standard data collection and quality assurance protocols for systematic deployment of our platform across multiple institutions. Second, our work will result in automated algorithms and analytic tools to objectivel measure skill using data captured with our platform. Third, we will establish objective methods to determine whether a surgeon is competent to perform surgery. Fourth, we will test the reliability and validity of our assessment tools. We will conduct our study using septoplasty as the prototype test-bed procedure. Septoplasty is a commonly performed procedure (more than 260,000 cases per year) and is a key index surgery by which residents in otolaryngology are evaluated. Our project lays the groundwork for subsequent research to establish national standards for objective skill and competency using data aggregated from numerous training programs in the country.