Research Agenda for Entrustable Professional Activities Among US Surgical Specialties

The magnitude of advances in surgical care inspires awe consistent with the impact of these developments on patients' lives. With this comes greater knowledge, new practices, and novel technologies for integration into residency training, making the skillset required of today's residents quite different from those in the past. Competency-based medical education and learner-centered approaches offer innovative and studied methodologies for teaching, learning, and assessment to meet the demands of today's educational environment. The authors provide an overview of competency-based medical education, its association with Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education Milestones as a competency framework, a description and outline of the emerging execution of Entrustable Professional Activities in the surgical disciplines, and a research agenda focused on Entrustable Professional Activities for American Board of Surgery certified surgical specialties in the United States. The research agenda includes five domains of inquiry: entrustment and practice readiness; bias and environment; distinguishing features and certification; qualitative feedback; and patient outcomes, and builds upon prior work by ten Cate et al. by expanding upon their organizing framework to also include the element of time. Additionally, the authors provide questions and suggest data integration strategies that might foster a breadth of studies investigating the utility of Entrustable Professional Activities in surgical training. Collectively engaging in such a process of evaluation early in the process of competency-based reform will serve to optimize education, assessment, and ultimately patient care.