Surgery Website as a 24/7 Adjunct to a Surgical Curriculum

Abstract

Objective: Successfully teaching duty hour restricted trainees demands engaging learning opportunities. Our surgical educational website and its associated assets were assessed to understand how such a resource was being used.

Design: Our website was accessible to all Mayo Clinic employees via the internal web network. Website access data from April 2015 through October 2016 were retrospectively collected using Piwik.

Setting: Academic, tertiary care referral center with a large general surgery training program. Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN.

Participants: A total of 257 Mayo Clinic employees used the website.

Results: The website had 48,794 views from 6313 visits by 257 users who spent an average of 14 ± 11 minutes on the website. Our website houses 295 videos, 51 interactive modules, 14 educational documents, and 7 flashcard tutorials. The most popular content type was videos, with a total of 30,864 views. The most popular visiting time of the day was between 8 pm and 9 pm with 6358 views (13%), and Thursday was the most popular day with 17,907 views (37%). A total of 78% of users accessed content beyond the homepage. Average visits peaked in relation to 2 components of our curriculum: a 240% increase one day before our biannual intern simulation assessments, and a 61% increase one day before our weekly conducted Friday simulation sessions. Interns who rotated on the service of the staff surgeon who actively endorses the website had 93% more actions per visit as compared to other users. The highest clicks were on the home banner for our weekly simulation session pre-emptive videos, followed by "groin anatomy," and "TEP hernia repair" videos.

Conclusions: Our website acted as a "just-in-time" accessible portal to reliable surgical information. It supplemented the time sensitive educational needs of our learners by serving as a heavily used adjunct to 3 components of our surgical education curriculum: weekly simulation sessions, biannual assessments, and clinical rotations.

Keywords: Medical Knowledge; Practice-Based Learning and Improvement; assessments; educational website; faculty endorsement; simulation; surgical curriculum; website usage data.