Patient Tracking Policy

  • Last Modified: Jan 17, 2025
  • Sponsor(s):
  • Responsible Office(s): Council on Curriculum

Reason for Policy

The UMKC School of Medicine learning objectives are articulated with the Competency-Based Curriculum and all required clinical clerkships must provide students with sufficient and consistent opportunities to satisfy these objectives. It is the responsibility of the individual clerkship faculty to confirm that their clerkship objectives support the goals of the Competency-Based Curriculum.

They accomplish this partially by identifying which disease states/conditions/skills/procedures are essential, and partly by stating what level or responsibility should be achieved by each student, and by defining the appropriate clinical setting. Patient Tracking Software (PTS) exists to assist clerkship directors and clerkship faculty in assessing what students are experiencing during their clerkship and how closely they have met previously identified clerkship objectives. PTS also provides assistance to clerkships and the school in meeting the LCME ED-2 standard.

The following principles serve to guide clerkships in meeting this responsibility:

  1. Clerkships are responsible for developing a list of clinical encounter and patient-type content (major disease states or conditions or clinical skills/procedures) that each student can reasonably expect to encounter during their clerkship. Most likely clerkships will identify general categories and provide specific disease states/conditions/skills/procedures which correspond to each of the identified categories.
  2. The length of the content list(s) should be sufficient to satisfy the core clerkship objectives. At this time, there are no specific requirements on numbers of encounters. The clerkship must provide a mechanism for students to encounter this experience regardless of the time of year the clerkship is scheduled for a student.
  3. The numbers of patients necessary to satisfy clerkship objectives is left to the individual clerkships to decide: however, these clerkship-defined numbers must be clearly identified for students. Requirements on numbers of experiences should be set consistent with the following:
    • The necessary time to experience the required numbers of patients should not exceed reasonable work hours for students.
    • A single patient may satisfy multiple content items (disease states/conditions/skills/procedures), but the requirements for a meaningful encounter (defined by the clerkship) must be satisfied for each.
    • The level of student responsibility for each encounter must be defined (participation, observation, etc.), as well as the clinical setting in which the encounter takes place.
    • As a component of the required mid-rotation assessment, a mid-rotation review of reported PTS activities should be documented by the clerkship director for all students to determine what each student has already encountered and what he/she is likely to encounter over the remainder of the clerkship. A timely review should allow the clerkship director sufficient opportunity to provide the student with a personalized experience to help them meet all outstanding clerkship encounters which may include use of alternative methodology such as MedU CLIPP Case(s), fmCASE(s), assigned readings, simulation experience or oral presentation.
  4. All students should enter patient data in the PTS on a weekly basis to provide adequate information for the mid-rotation assessment. Students who do not comply with this requirement will be penalized as defined by the clerkship director. Students must enter all required patient data into the PTS by midnight of the last day of the clerkship to show their clerkship requirements have been met. Students who fail to meet this PTS requirement will have their final grade in the clerkship reduced by one level (e.g., honors to high pass).
  5. Students are responsible to register with the correct course and section numbers in the UMKC Pathway system in order to maintain correct rosters in the Patient Tracking System. Any discrepancies should be reported to the Clerkship Coordinator and the student’s ETC immediately. Failure to register correctly does not excuse a student from this Patient Tracking Policy.

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