In response to a recommendation from the Invitational Conference on USMLE® Scoring (InCUS), the organizations comprising the Coalition for Physician Accountability, of which NBME is a member, agreed to collaboratively review the transition from UME to GME.
The Coalition’s Undergraduate Medical Education to Graduate Medical Education Review Committee (UGRC) released its preliminary recommendations on addressing the challenges that exist in the transition from medical school to residency. As an organizational member of the Coalition, NBME encouraged interested stakeholders to provide feedback on these recommendations during the public comment period, which ended on May 26. The recommendations can still be accessed here.
NBME is committed to the work of the Coalition and helping to find solutions that will improve the UME-GME transition. With respect to our role in the transition, the USMLE program’s upcoming change to Pass/Fail reporting for Step 1 is consistent with the Coalition’s recommendation to use assessments for their intended purpose.
As an organization identified as an assessment leader, we remain committed to developing and delivering assessments of the many expected competencies of health professionals. This includes supporting all stakeholders involved in the UME-GME transition. We are collaborating with the medical education and regulatory communities to explore competency-based assessments for the education and licensure space and to enhance the measurement of clinical skills within the USMLE Step examinations. We remain committed to upholding key principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion in this work towards systemic change. As we develop new assessments and tools and improve our current ones, we will continue to focus on the critically important assessment tenets of access, fairness, and bias mitigation.
We look forward to hearing the feedback and to working to advance the work of the Coalition.
