Competency assessment of residents in surgical pathology using virtual microscopy.

Our goal was to develop an efficient and reliable performance-based virtual slide competency examination in general surgical pathology that objectively measures pathology resident's morphologic diagnostic skill. A Perl scripted MySQL database was used to develop the test editor and test interface. Virtual slides were created with the Aperio ScanScope.

A Web-based database for pathology faculty effort reporting.

To ensure appropriate mission-based budgeting and equitable distribution of funds for faculty salaries, our compensation committee developed a pathology-specific effort reporting database. Principles included the following: (1) measurement should be done by web-based databases; (2) most entry should be done by departmental administration or be relational to other databases; (3) data entry categories should be aligned with funding streams; and (4) units of effort should be equal across categories of effort (service, teaching, research). MySQL was used for all data transactions (http://dev.