Improving Graduate Medical Education by Aggregating Data Across the Medical Education Continuum

Data sharing and big data in health professions education: Ottawa consensus statement and recommendations for scholarship

Changes in digital technology, increasing volume of data collection, and advances in methods have the potential to unleash the value of big data generated through the education of health professionals. Coupled with this potential are legitimate concerns about how data can be used or misused in ways that limit autonomy, equity, or harm stakeholders. This consensus statement is intended to address these issues by foregrounding the ethical imperatives for engaging with big data as well as the potential risks and challenges. Recognizing the wide and ever evolving scope of big data scholarship, we focus on foundational issues for framing and engaging in research. We ground our recommendations in the context of big data created through data sharing across and within the stages of the continuum of the education and training of health professionals. Ultimately, the goal of this statement is to support a culture of trust and quality for big data research to deliver on its promises for health professions education (HPE) and the health of society. Based on expert consensus and review of the literature, we report 19 recommendations in (1) framing scholarship and research through research, (2) considering unique ethical practices, (3) governance of data sharing collaborations that engage stakeholders, (4) data sharing processes best practices, (5) the importance of knowledge translation, and (6) advancing the quality of scholarship through multidisciplinary collaboration. The recommendations were modified and refined based on feedback from the 2022 Ottawa Conference attendees and subsequent public engagement. Adoption of these recommendations can help HPE scholars share data ethically and engage in high impact big data scholarship, which in turn can help the field meet the ultimate goal: high-quality education that leads to high-quality healthcare.

Practical, Privacy and Ethical, and Philosophical Considerations for Using Big Data in Medical Education

ABSTRACT

In this issue of Academic Medicine , Thelen and colleagues present a thoughtful perspective on the emerging opportunity to use longitudinal educational data to improve graduate medical education and optimize the education of individual residents, and call for the accelerated development of large interinstitutional data sets for this purpose. Such applications of big data to medical education hold great promise in terms of informing the teaching of individuals, enhancing transitions between phases of training and between institutions, and permitting better longitudinal education research. At the same time, there is a tension between whose data they are and consequently how they ought to be used. This commentary proposes some practical, privacy and ethical, and philosophical considerations that need to be explored as early efforts to aggregate data across the medical education continuum mature and new efforts are undertaken.