ACGME Outcomes Project: selling our expertise.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) Outcomes Project emphasizes competency outcome assessment by residency programs. Many residency programs are unprepared to undertake valid competency assessments. Family medicine educators, however, often have substantial experience in competency-based evaluation. We developed a program, with more than 240,000 US dollars of funding from our dean's office, through which our family medicine educational unit provided support to more than 60 residency programs in various specialties. This program assisted directors of these 60 programs to understand the ACGME competency domains, develop measurable competencies for their discipline, and develop evaluation tools to assess those competencies. We were thus able to "sell" our expertise to other programs and generate income for our department.