Minutes

WVRHEP Evaluation Committee

March 13, 2006

Members Present: Kathleen Bors, Jodie Jackson (Chair), Sara Miller, Dalena Riggs, Ken Shannon

Others present: Dan Brody, Hilda Heady, Kim Robinson

Jodie Jackson reported on the HRSA AHEC review that is going to take place in April, 2006. Presently Hilda Heady, Jodie Jackson, Sandra Pope, Margaret Novacich and Ken Shannon are working with an evaluator appointed by HRSA to develop three performance measures for the WV AHEC. Jodie talked briefly about the proposed performance measures that have to be approved by the evaluator. Dan Brody was concerned about having enough AHEC responses to compare AHEC to RHEP. He also expressed concern that, based on a few open-ended comments from the last six months, some AHEC students might not realize that they are “AHEC”. Jodie said that with the first data download, 140 AHEC students were identified in TRACKER with approximately 80 submitting SERFEs. There were some students, though, who were not flagged as “AHEC” in TRACKER and AHEC directors were directed (after this first AHEC data download) to make sure that all of their AHEC students were flagged as AHEC. The next download should have greater than 140 AHEC students and, hopefully, greater than 80 SERFEs. AHEC students who are not flagged as AHEC do not have access to the 3 AHEC-specific questions at the end of the SERFE so some of these students who were not flagged as AHEC in TRACKER may have completed a SERFE without having the opportunity to complete the 3 AHEC questions.

One of the measures may look at the number of medical residents who are participating in AHEC. It has been very difficult for some of the regional AHECs to recruit residents. Residents don’t necessarily lead the AHEC team in all IDTs. Ken Shannon and Hilda Heady said that it is not a problem for residents to get away from their residency institution for a month. They can even be away from their continuity clinic for one month. Federal reimbursement to the residency institution is not a problem any more but many institutions may still think it is a problem. Filling the clinic and call schedules when the resident is away is sometimes a problem for institutions.

Jodie distributed a comparison of the SERFE response rates by school and by consortium for the time period 7/1/05 – 12/31/05 compared to the previous six months (1/1/05 – 6/30/05). The overall response rate had increased from 59% to 77%! This is at least partially due to the fact that it was recently discovered that the TRACKER code initiating automatic emails to students requesting that they complete the SERFE was only activated for the first of the 3 proposed automatic emails (students are supposed to be getting an automatic email reminder one week before their rotation ends, one week after the rotation ends and 3 weeks after the rotation ends). Instead, students were only getting the one email one week before their rotation ended. Jodie once again commended the EWV-P consortium for an outstanding response rate of 98% and explained to the committee that this consortium consistently gets a high response rate primarily due to emphasizing the importance of the evaluation and sending out a personal email requesting that they complete the SERFE. Some schools are consistently getting a lower response rate. Jodie would like to see all schools/consortia try to keep their response rates above 75%.

Jodie informed the Committee that she would be giving a presentation about the highlights of research for the PERD report to the R & R Committee and the Advisory Panel today and offered to give anyone who was not going to make it to one of those two meetings a copy of the presentation.