At Indiana University, HI-IQ facilitates management of all aspects of our large training program. Our residents and fellows rotate through seven hospitals including an academic university research center, a comprehensive tertiary-care pediatric hospital, and two adult level 1 designation trauma centers. We use HI-IQ to assist with restructuring block schedules, monitoring trainee progress, developing case conferences, research datamining, and recruitment. These are services not provided by the typical EMR/RIS. We have found the HI-IQ trainee report generation and datamining capabilities particularly useful.
Our reading room assistants input all cases into HI-IQ once dictated. Not only does this improve reliability of data entry but it removes this burden from the fellows who can then use this time on more worthwhile educational activities.
Since HI-IQ allows for up-to-date case tracking, we can restructure block rotations to account for the ever-evolving practice environments with respect to hospital-specific case variety and volume. Similarly, we can accurately track the progress of trainees as they transition from hospital to hospital throughout the year. This allows us to quickly identify any learning gaps and appropriately shift block rotations depending of the aggregate data we have available from each individual hospital.
We use HI-IQ to track “interesting cases” as well as complications for our weekly interesting case conferences and monthly morbidity/mortality conferences. Trainees can review their cases to present at interesting case conference and multidisciplinary conferences as well as augment journal club presentations. Fellows can review cases with complications to better prepare for morbidity/mortality conference.
The datamining capabilities of HI-IQ are useful for quickly developing quality improvement projects or clinical research. Trainees can access data in aggregate from the entire institution. Datamining capabilities directly correlate with the completeness and detail of data entry. On the most basic level, HI-IQ can report which cases were performed at each practice site in a given period of time.
Trainee recruitment is simplified by the ability to easily report case breakdown by institution and individual. We can provide applicants with an idea of what a “typical” trainee experience would be over a given year. We can also show how the trainee experiences evolve from year to year. Applicants have relayed they appreciate up-to-date institutional and individual case data.
HI-IQ has been a useful tool to improve the overall trainee experience at our institution. If used properly and diligently, it can provide administration and trainees with a robust database for educational, clinical, and research activities.
