Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education's (ACGME's) general competency and outcome assessment initiative (i.e., the ACGME Outcome Project) is an effort to enhance residency education and accreditation effectiveness by increasing emphasis on educational outcomes. The Project is also a response to concerns about new graduates' ability to meet the demands of today's practice environment. ⋯ Outcome assessment will provide evidence of residency program educational effectiveness and information to guide improvement. This paper discusses the development and implementations of assessment methods appropriate to evaluate the performance of residents in each of the core competencies.
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There are widespread and growing concerns about the variable and too often inadequate quality of health care in the United States. As a result, health care quality is being questioned and subjected to scrutiny as never before. ⋯ Emergency medicine will definitely be affected by the quality improvement movement and should quickly move forward to define and establish performance measures for high-quality emergency care in an era when chronic disease dominates the agenda. Emergency medicine should also aggressively work to operationalize a culture of quality to minimize medical errors, to practice evidence-based medicine, to translate research results into clinical practice in a timely manner, and to establish accountability mechanisms for quality improvement and clinical excellence.