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C-SATS’ Solution to Evaluate Technical Skills of Medical Student Applicants Prior to Resident Selection Deployed By UC Irvine Health Department of Urology

Innovative performance management system will help identify the best surgical candidates for surgical training

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON (PRWEB) JANUARY 28, 2016

C-SATS (www.csats.com), a venture-backed healthcare technology company on a mission to empower the nation’s healthcare institutions so they can assess and improve the performance of their surgeons and other professionals continuously, accurately and objectively, today announced that the UC Irvine Health Department of Urology will deploy its technology to evaluate the technical skills of medical student applicants to the department’s surgical residency program. The goal is to empower the selection of the most talented students to enter into urological training.

The current state of technical skills’ assessment of practicing and training surgeons is expensive, time-intensive and highly subjective. C-SATS’ scalable solution, which includes the collection and uploading of surgical videos to a secure cloud service, utilizes a unique combination of distributed experts and extra-institutional reviewers to assess technical performance with a level of accuracy that’s equivalent to current evaluation modalities, but with less bias and less time required to achieve results. (Chen C, Et al. Crowd-Sourced Assessment of Technical Skills: a novel method to evaluate surgical performance. J Surgical Res. 2014; 187(1): 65-71.)

In addition to providing assessment of applicants to the department of urology’s surgical residency program at the University of California, Irvine, C-SATS will also be applied to training urology residents to provide them with feedback as they seek to meet and exceed targeted performance metrics.

Specifically, C-SATS will: 

  • Accept, process, encode and transcode videos of the applicant and resident performances

  • Assign videos to pre-qualified reviewers and provide them online access to rate them

  • Analyze and mine quantitative and qualitative results for actionable insights

  • Deliver results, scores and insights through online performance summary dashboards

“Our solution is a critical and necessary breakthrough,” explains Derek Streat, CEO of C-SATS, “and, working with forward-thinking healthcare institutions like the University of California, Irvine, we can help make certain that the most technically skilled surgeons populate our nation’s operating rooms.”    

Adds Dr. Jaime Landman, Chair, UC Irvine Health Department of Urology: “We’re quality-driven throughout our hospital and a major part of that means ensuring patients and their families that only the best surgeons are operating. C-SATS’ offers a solution that helps us back up that pledge with sophisticated technology.”

About C-SATS

Seattle-based C-SATS, Inc. (www.csats.com) is a venture-backed healthcare technology company on a mission to empower the nation’s healthcare institutions so they can assess and improve the performance of their surgeons and other professionals continuously, accurately and objectively. Based on technology developed at the University of Washington by a team of surgeons, biostatisticians and engineers, C-SATS’ performance management system utilizes a unique combination of distributed experts and pre-qualified reviewers to assess surgical skill. After benchmarking a team and identifying the gaps in performance, C-SATS recommends targeted curriculum to help teams improve and track their performance improvement longitudinally. Medical centers across the U.S. and Canada have completed one million assessments via C-SATS for a variety of uses, including credentialing and privileging, residency and training, and continuous quality improvement.

About UC Irvine Health

UC Irvine Health comprises the clinical, medical education and research enterprises of the University of California, Irvine. Patients can access UC Irvine Health at physician offices throughout Orange County and at its main campus, UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, Calif., a 411-bed acute care hospital that provides tertiary and quaternary care, ambulatory and specialty medical clinics, behavioral health and rehabilitation. U.S. News & World Report has listed it among America’s Best Hospitals for 15 consecutive years. UC Irvine Medical Center features Orange County’s only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center, high-risk perinatal/neonatal program, Level I trauma center and Level II pediatric trauma center, and is the primary teaching hospital for UC Irvine School of Medicine. UC Irvine Health serves a region of more than 3 million people in Orange County, western Riverside County and southeast Los Angeles County. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.