The American Board of Surgery (ABS) is pleased to announce that it has selected the Firefly Foundation (Firefly) to develop the technology platform for the assessment of trainees in specialty surgical training programs as part of its Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA) project.
The ABS began implementation of 18 general surgery EPAs in July 2023 to form the foundation for competency-based assessment of surgical residents nationwide. Since that time, over 340,000 general surgery EPA assessments have been collected, the majority through the ABS EPA Application. All applicants to the 2028 General Surgery Qualifying Exam (GSQE) will be required to turn in a composite profile across all EPAs when they apply for the exam.
Due to the very specific and varied needs of the remaining ABS specialty areas, the ABS has made the decision to collaborate with Firefly for the development of the platform that will support EPA assessment collection for vascular surgery, pediatric surgery, complex general surgical oncology, and surgical critical care. Firefly will provide the mobile platform, secure data storage, and data analytics that will enable specialty surgical training programs to effectively and efficiently implement the EPA assessment model. General surgery programs will continue to use the existing ABS EPA Application.
The ABS will utilize a customized build of Firefly’s assessment platform, which will be tailored specifically for the ABS EPA assessment model. “The mobile-based platform will allow for time-efficient, feedback-oriented assessment of trainee performance in the course of daily clinical workflow,” said ABS Vice President Dr. Karen Brasel, M.D., M.P.H., “and will be provided under ABS sponsorship to all ACGME-accredited vascular surgery, pediatric surgery, complex general surgical oncology, and surgical critical care training programs.”
“We are excited to work with the ABS to develop their upcoming EPA platform and are honored to contribute to their transformative initiative in competency-based surgical education,” said Jonathan Jesneck, Ph.D., and Ruchi Thanawala, M.D., M.S., Firefly Foundation Chief Technology Officer and Executive Director, respectively. “We are proud to bring our years of experience in developing educational platforms and empowering the advancement of learning through data science.”
Additional information and training materials for the specialty-specific application will be available and shared with programs in summer 2025.
For additional information about the ABS EPA Project, please visit our EPA information hub. FAQs and additional information related to the ABS EPA App powered by Firefly will be available on the ABS website in the coming months.
About the ABS
The American Board of Surgery is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1937 for the purpose of certifying individuals who have met a defined standard of education, training and knowledge in the field of surgery. Surgeons certified by the ABS have completed at least five years of surgical training following medical school and successfully completed a written and oral examination process administered by the ABS. They must then maintain their board certification through ongoing learning and practice improvement activities.
The ABS offers board certification in general surgery, vascular surgery, pediatric surgery, surgical critical care, and complex general surgical oncology, surgery of the hand. It is one of the 24 member boards of the American Board of Medical Specialties.
About the Firefly Foundation
The Firefly Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization, is dedicated to accelerating medical and surgical education through computational data science. Supporting over 100 hospitals and over 25 specialties, Firefly is empowering the education community in its evolution towards competency-based medical education. Firefly supports educational improvement initiatives and research, and provides evidence-based digital educational tools to training programs. The core contributions are in inventing statistical methods for measuring trainee competency and learning curves to track skill improvement, building EHR data integrations to automate educational platforms, implementing data ontologies for adding an educational data layer on top of medical data, and designing and building machine learning systems for creating precision education plans. Both HIPAA compliant and FERPA compliant, Firefly is also a Patient Safety Organization (PSO).