Incorporating Medical Student Documentation Into the Billable Encounter: A Pragmatic Approach to Implementation of the 2018 Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Rule Revision.

In early 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released the Medical Review of Evaluation and Management (E/M) Documentation, which allows supervising teaching physicians to rely on a medical student's documentation to support billing for E/M services. This change has potential to enhance education, clinical documentation quality, and the satisfaction of students, postgraduate trainees, and teaching physicians. However, its practical adoption presents many challenges that must be navigated successfully to realize these important goals in compliance with federal and local requirements, while avoiding unintended downstream problems.

Impact of peer assessment on the professional development of medical students: a qualitative study.

Purpose: Peer assessment can predict future academic performance and provide medical students with reliable feedback about professionalism. It is unclear whether peer assessment fosters personal growth or transformations in attitudes or behaviors. The authors investigated what types of peer feedback students remember and what reactions or transformations students experience as a result of peer assessment.

Further challenges in measuring communication skills: accounting for actor effects in standardised patient assessments.

Context: Subjective rating scales for communication skills may yield more personally meaningful responses than more standardised rating schemes. It is unclear, however, whether such evaluations may be overly biased by respondents' rating styles, which may lead to unreliable measurement of examinees' communication skills.

Methods: Our study involved 212 students from the classes of 2005 and 2006 at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.

Changes in self-perceived abilities among male and female medical students after the first year of clinical training.

Background: It is known that male and female medical students have different experiences in their clinical training.

Aims: To assess whether male and female medical students change in their self-rated work habits and interpersonal habits during the first year of clinical training.

Method: Longitudinal study of self- and peer-assessment among 224 medical students in 3 consecutive classes at a private US medical school.

Relationship between peer assessment during medical school, dean's letter rankings, and ratings by internship directors.

Background: It is not known to what extent the dean's letter (medical student performance evaluation [MSPE]) reflects peer-assessed work habits (WH) skills and/or interpersonal attributes (IA) of students.

Objective: To compare peer ratings of WH and IA of second- and third-year medical students with later MSPE rankings and ratings by internship program directors.

Design And Participants: Participants were 281 medical students from the classes of 2004, 2005, and 2006 at a private medical school in the northeastern United States, who had participated in peer assessment exercises in the second and third years of medical school.

Effects of rater selection on peer assessment among medical students.

Context: Although peer-assessment appears promising as a method to assess interpersonal skills among medical students, results may be biased by method of peer selection, particularly if different kinds of classmates are assigned systematically by different methods. It is also unclear whether students with lower interpersonal skills may be more negative towards their classmates than students with higher levels of interpersonal skills and, if so, how much bias this may introduce into the results of peer assessment. It is also unclear whether low-rated students are more likely to ask to rate one another.

Temporal and group-related trends in peer assessment amongst medical students.

Peer assessment has been increasingly recommended as a way to evaluate the professional competencies of medical trainees. Prior studies have only assessed single groups measured at a single timepoint. Thus, neither the longitudinal stability of such ratings nor differences between groups using the same peer-assessment instrument have been reported previously.

Peer assessment of professional competence.

Background: Current assessment formats for medical students reliably test core knowledge and basic skills. Methods for assessing other important domains of competence, such as interpersonal skills, humanism and teamwork skills, are less well developed. This study describes the development, implementation and results of peer assessment as a measure of professional competence of medical students to be used for formative purposes.

Comprehensive assessment of professional competence: the Rochester experiment.

Background: A required 2-week comprehensive assessment (CA) for 2nd-year medical students that integrates basic science, clinical skills, information management, and professionalism was implemented.

Description: The CA links standardized patients (SPs) with computer-based exercises, a teamwork exercise, and peer assessments; and culminates in student-generated learning plans.

Evaluation: Scores assigned by SPs showed acceptable interrater reliability.