Attending physicians’ reviews of residents appear to correlate with their American Board of Radiology Core Exam score, according to new research published Sunday.
Recent conversations have questioned the ABR Qualifying Exam’s validity at measuring physician performance. Texas imaging experts recently set out to settle this debate, analyzing data from dozens of residents who had taken the test.
They found a clear correlation, with decreased evaluation scores from attending physicians during the first three years of residency aligning with whether individuals failed the exam.
“Although we acknowledge that a single institution analysis does not validate the ABR Qualifying (Core) Examination as a measure of resident performance, it is the first published evidence that the examination does correlate with subjective evaluations of resident performance,” Gary Horn Jr., MD, an assistant professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, and co-authors wrote Feb. 27 in Academic Radiology. “Multi-institutional evaluations of subjective resident scoring on evaluations when compared to ABR Qualifying (Core) Examination performance would be helpful in establishing the ability of the examination to identify underperforming residents while still in training,” the team cautioned later.
For their study, Horn et al. gathered attending evaluation scores for all rad residents at their institution who completed their Core Exam between 2013-2019. A total of 42 residents met the study’s criteria, eight of whom failed on their first attempt. Residents who did not pass scored an average, nonweighted attending evaluation score of 80.24% compared to 83.71% for those who did. Correcting for class year, researchers noted a statistically significant correlation, spanning the three years, between decreasing attending evaluation scores and failing the test.
“By adjusting for class year, we hoped to negate the differences in the faculty evaluating each resident,” the authors reported. “Of note, even without adjusting for these variables, there was a statistically significant correlation between lower resident evaluation scores for years 2 and 3, as well as with the 3-year average score.”
Read more in the Association of University Radiologists’ official journal here.
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.