Competency-Based Resident Education

Over the course of the last decade fundamental changes have occurred in residency training. The basis of these changes has been rooted in the desire to simultaneously improve the quality of the learning experience while decreasing the demands of training on resident lifestyle. The ACGME Outcomes Project was initiated in 1999 with the intent of facilitating such change in medical education. Before its introduction, assessment of residency training sites focused on the processes, resources, and reputation of an individual program, but failed to assess how effectively a program used those assets. The stated goal of the ACGME Outcomes Project has been to drive an evolution of this process-oriented form of education to one that is based on outcomes that measure the effect of the educational experience. This article is a brief overview of current efforts to achieve this goal.