ACGME Resident Case Log
All residents must maintain a record of their surgical procedures on the Resident Case Log
System provided by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACMGE) at
Include procedures performed in clinic as well as in the operating room.
ACGME’s Otolaryngology Residency Review Committee highly recommends that residents log
their cases on a weekly, or more frequent, basis, so that procedures don’t become lost or
forgotten. Residents are able to view their case logs at any time, and can correct entries as
needed. The Program Director is able to, at any time, review the operative data submitted by
each of the residents. A number of statistics regarding operative data are available on the
ACGME web site (password protected) for access by residents and program directors, including
cumulative national medians, means and standard deviations for each procedure category,
subdivided by year of otolaryngology training. Program Directors are able to scan the case logs
of each of their residents, tagged for procedure experiences 1 standard deviation or more below
the national norms per resident year of training, so they can tailor resident rotations accordingly.
Residents will be able to print out their cumulative operative experiences.
ACGME will provide the American Board of Otolaryngology with the operative experience report
it requires when the resident applies for examination.
Resident logging of procedures relies solely on the AMA’s CPT coding system. The opportunity
to use the CPT codes prepares the residents for coding procedures after the completion of
residency training.
The one, and significant, deviation from CPT coding rules allows for “unbundling” so that all
procedures or significant segments of such done by each resident can be captured. Ample
samples of “unbundling” acceptable for resident reporting purposes have been placed as a link
on the Resident Case Log web site.
Categories of resident involvement in a surgical procedure include “resident surgeon,”
“assistant surgeon” and “resident supervisor.” Definitions of these categories are available on
the resident case log web site.
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