Education & Training
McMaster and Logibec partner on educational platform
May 3, 2023
QUEBEC CITY – During the 2023 International Congress on Academic Medicine (ICAM), held from April 15-17th, McMaster University’s Faculty of Health Sciences and Logibec presented a workshop that highlighted the power of partnership in developing a platform that is intuitive, mobile, and efficient for competency-based medical education (CBME).
The creation of the CBME program, announced by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada (RCPSC) in 2017, challenged Canada’s 17 medical universities to complete a rollout across all programs by 2022.
This new teaching paradigm came with many administrative challenges: an increasing amount and variety of evaluation material, frequent feedback to learners, schedule coordination, management of entrustable professional activities (EPAs), etc.
McMaster University has over 1,200 postgraduate residents and fellows in 59 different residency programs across a large geographic area. With such a major curriculum change and the need to manage it across all residency programs, it became clear that a powerful solution was needed.
A pilot program was designed to bring CBME programs onto a single platform, where all users would be trained. The team at Logibec recognized early on that the success of the project would depend not only on training learners, but everyone else who would be using the platform: supervisors, training program directors, competence committee members, and chairs.
“The training process of the onboarding programs at the time of the launch took 3-5 months, and the results were worth it,” said Zuzana Romano (pictured), business analyst at the McMaster University “The pilot was a huge success, with tremendous feedback from all parties involved. In fact, this specific pilot was so successful that McMaster University is still using it to this day with new programs that are being onboarded,” she added.
The partnership worked well, as McMaster University was already using the Logibec MedSIS 3C platform for evaluations, but it was time to develop a new module.
One of the strengths of the pilot is that it enabled the development of an intuitive design, which was strongly inspired by the suggestions from McMaster University. Learners find the platform easy to use and navigate, making it an ideal tool for busy healthcare professionals and administrators. Teachers can produce effectiveness scores after each rotation, and these scores are collected and sent to the platform for accreditation purposes.
Features developed include a dashboard that gives a visual overview of the learner’s progress with instant updates, mobile evaluation forms and follow-ups, integration with other systems, reporting, and dynamic CBME forms that are populated as the trainees/supervisors select the EPA on their mobile device.
The partnership has enabled McMaster University to use a platform that provides learners with the support they need to develop practical skills and knowledge in a structured and efficient manner. This also reduces the administrative burden of faculty and program directors.
The flexibility and dynamic aspects of the platform has helped other institutions like the University of Toronto, University of Alberta, and Université de Montréal to ensure the quality of medical education provided by the faculty remains high, while also providing valuable data that can be used for accreditation purposes.
As of 2023, the Logibec MedSIS 3C platform is used by over 40,000 learners, administrators, and health professionals in Canada, providing them with a cloud-based platform that centralizes admissions, registration, study programs, timelines and competency-based education, and analytical data. It processes over 10 million evaluations annually, not only designed for medical education, but also for other health sciences students such as nurses and pharmacists.
Do you play a role in implementing and improving competency-based medical education programs? We encourage you to register for our webinar Mitigating the Challenges of CBME: The Need for the Right Platform on May 10th, 1:00 PM (EST) to learn how you can leverage technology to drive positive change in medical education.
About McMaster University
Founded in 1887, McMaster University is ranked in the world’s Top 75 by the Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings. A medical-doctoral, research-intensive public university, McMaster is dedicated to advancing human and societal health and well-being.
About Logibec
For 40 years, Logibec has been a partner in technology for the healthcare network. In addition to solutions for medical education in health sciences, the company specializes in providing solutions for clinical, workforce, financial and supply management as well as performance and analytics. Innovation is at the heart of Logibec’s activities to increase the efficiency of the whole healthcare experience and organization.