This week's edition of the e-Communication includes information the Annual Educational Conference; ACGME Awards; Review and Comment; and Milestones News.

Kelli Corning is the Associate Director of the University of Washington’s internal medicine residency program. She has been actively involved in program coordinator activities throughout her career in GME and participated in the full Annual Educational Conference, and also presented at the pre-conference Coordinator Forum. Additionally, this year Ms. Corning was a recipient of the ACGME’s GME Program Coordinator Excellence Award, which she received at the conference.

Dr. Chinelo Okigbo is a PGY-3 Internal Medicine Chief Resident at AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in New Jersey. She attended the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference as part of the Back to Bedside initiative. As a resident and first-time Annual Educational Conference attendee, we asked her to share her impressions based on her experience.

The ACGME's Developing Faculty Competencies in Assessment course in Chicago, as well as a growing number of regional courses based on it, teach practical and effective applications of multiple assessment methods and tools; guidance for creating effective assessment programs; and techniques to most effectively use the Milestones and Entrustable Professional Activities for professional development.

During their presentation “Using Public Data to Follow Graduates into Practice,” at the 2019 Annual Educational Conference, Marc M. Triola, MD and Patrick M. Cocks, MD, from the NYU School of Medicine have leveraged large databases of publicly available information to help understand the patterns of health care practice and outcomes among graduates from programs once they have left the programs.

John Madara, MD wanted to find a way to improve incoming residents’ ability to identify and mitigate patient safety hazards, address these hazards through teamwork and collaboration, and report safety events using an online event reporting system. Dr. Madara, the chief fellow in pulmonary and critical care medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, worked with others to create an interactive, competitive “escape room” themed environment to stimulate learning and teamwork. His poster, Patient Safety Escape!: Engaging Residents in Patient Safety Education and Event Reporting, reports on the activity and its effectiveness in teaching residents about patient safety and online reporting procedures.

Physician educators must explore ways to teach physicians to practice with excellence, compassion, and justice, Dr. Arno K. Kumagai argued at the most recent Baldwin Seminar, the first of the 2019-2020 season. His talk, Reflection, Dialogue and Different Ways of Knowing: Beyond the Competency Paradigm in Medical Education, took place June 26 at the ACGME offices in Chicago, and was livestreamed.

ACGME Manager, Employee Communications Emily Vasiliou wrote about her experience attending the ACGME's annual Awards Retreat for recipients of the Courage to Lead and Courage to Teach Awards for the first time in 10 years.

A panel of institutional representatives and ACGME leaders discussed the successes and challenges of actively involving residents in patient safety improvement as part of the ACGME’s Pursuing Excellence in Clinical Learning Environments (Pursuing Excellence) initiative. The panel convened at a sunset session at the 2019 ACGME Annual Educational Conference.