Found in transition: Applying milestones to three unique discharge curricula

Introduction: A safe and effective transition from hospital to post acute care is a complex and important physician competency. Milestones and Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA) form the new educational rubric in Graduate Medical Education Training. ‘A safe and effective discharge from the hospital’ is an EPA ripe for educational innovation. Methods: The authors collaborated in a qualitative process called, mapping, to develop a Q-sort exercise to be distributed to participants at an Association for Program Directors in Internal Medicine (APDIM) workshop on milestones for transition of care. We analyzed the Q-sort results to rank the milestones in order of priority. We then applied this ranking to 3 innovative transitions of care curricula: Simulation (S), Discharge Clinic Feedback (DCF) and TRACER (T). Results: We collected 55 game boards from faculty units at the APDIM workshop. We report the prioritized milestones by Q-sort from the APDIM workshop. From the total 22 milestones, the simulation innovation identified 5/22 milestones, discharge clinic 9/22 milestones and tracer 7/22 milestones related to the EPA. Milestones identified in each innovation related back to one of the top eight prioritized milestones 75% of the time; thus more frequently than the milestones with lower priority. Discussion: We demonstrated that three unique innovations in transitions of care map to the top prioritized Q-sort milestones related to that EPA. Milestones for competency based assessment can be used to guide the development of innovative curricula in transition of care medicine.