The Impact of Trainee and Standardized Patient Race and Gender on Internal Medicine Resident Communication Assessment Scores.

Background: Standardized patient (SP) encounters are commonly used to assess communication skills in medical training. The impact of SP and resident demographics on the standardized communication ratings in residents has not been evaluated.

Objective: To examine the impact of gender and race on SP assessments of internal medicine (IM) residents' communication skills during postgraduate year (PGY) 1.

Methods: We performed a retrospective cohort study of all SP assessments of IM PGY-1 residents for a standardized communication exercise from 2012 to 2018. We performed descriptive analyses of numeric communication SP ratings by gender, race, and age (for residents and SPs). A generalized estimating equation model, clustered on individual SP, was used to determine the association of gender (among SP and residents) with communication ratings. A secondary analysis was performed to determine the impact of residents and SP racial concordance in communication scores.

Results: There were 1356 SP assessments of 379 IM residents (199 male residents [53%] and 178 female residents [47%]). There were significant differences in average numeric communication rating (mean 3.40 vs 3.34, .009) by gender of resident, with higher scores in female residents. There were no significant interactions between SP and resident gender across the communication domains. There were no significant interactions noted with racial concordance between interns and SPs.

Conclusions: Our data demonstrate an association of resident gender on ratings in standardized communication exercises, across multiple communication skills. There was not an interaction impact for gender or racial concordance between SPs and interns.