Clinical Assessment Tool

About

National Clinical Assessment Tool in Emergency Medicine and Web-Portal Tech ID: UA19-148 Invention: This is an assessment form (shift card) for medical students performing their emergency medical clinical rotation. It was created via a national consensus conference and is known as NCAT-EM.  The tool is designed to measure medical students’ clinical performance during a single shift, typically lasting 8-12 hours. An associated web portal was created by Johns Hopkins where site directors input de-identified demographic and assessment data for review.  Contributors to this technology are from multiple institutions.      Background: Despite differences in prior experience, background, school or specialty, physicians must be uniformly trained to provide safe, high-quality care. In order to assure this goal, valid and reliable assessment tools are needed to ensure that learners are competent. Formative assessment and feedback from preceptors in clinical clerkships is essential to foster learners’ professional development. Summative assessment is needed to measure competency and verify readiness for supervised practice in the graduate setting. Despite requirements by regulatory bodies, currently, clinical assessments in clerkships are imprecise, highly variable, lacking in reliability and validity evidence, and are not comparable between institutions. This is a serious problem that jeopardizes the quality, consistency and safety of patient care.