Impact of Faculty Incentivization on Resident Evaluations

Abstract

Introduction: In the Program Requirements for Graduate Medical Education in Emergency Medicine, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education requires frequent and routine feedback. It is a common challenge for program leadership to obtain adequate and effective summative evaluations. Methods: This is a retrospective, case-crossover, interventional study conducted in an academic medical center. This study occurred over a two-year period, with an intervention between years one and two. Throughout year two of the study, faculty incentive compensation was linked to completion of end-of-shift evaluations. We compared pre- an post-implementation data using paired sample t-tests with the significance level P < .05 applied. Results: After implementation of the incentive metric there was an increase in the number of total evaluations by 42% ( P = .001). The mean number of evaluations submitted by each faculty per shift increased from 0.45 to 0.86 (SD 0.56, P < .001). Overall, 32 of the 38 faculty members (84.2%) had an increase in the number of evaluations submitted per shift during the intervention period with an average increase of 0.5 evaluations per shift (range 0.01–1.54). Conclusion: Incentivizing faculty to submit resident evaluations through use of bonus compensation increased the number of evaluations at our institution. This information may be applied by other programs to increase resident evaluations.