An introduction to managing your T-Res program
As the Program Director of your training program, you have the ability to add new T-Res accounts. Accounts are split up into what we call ‘Trainee’ and ‘Staff’ accounts.
Trainee accounts are used by your trainees, and Staff accounts are used by your program's staff, who are typically preceptors working with students.
Here’s a quick overview of what you can do as a program director:
- View trainee activities
- View staff activities
- View trainee evaluations
- Add new trainee/staff accounts
- Add attending physicians
- Add new sites (aka hospitals)
- Adjust trainee schedules
- Create goal configurations
- Create email reminders (to remind trainees to log their clinical activities!)
Viewing program activities
Additional reports
Stage schedule admin
Trainees in T-Res are put into a "stage schedule" that matches their progression through the various years of training of their program. To inspect or adjust a trainee's stage schedule, go to Program > Trainee Schedules. A list of currently active trainees in the program will be displayed.
If a trainee got put into the wrong year by mistake, and is following the usual schedule progression without any breaks, you can reset that trainee's start stage and start date within the program. This will fill in all the stages from the start date until it hits the "Pass" stage in the schedule. This change can be done for multiple trainees and then saved once with the "Save All" option. This method of adjusting the stage schedule only applies if the trainee is following the usual pattern of training and does not take any breaks in between for a LOA or research.
Clicking on the trainee's name brings up the stage progression for the individual trainee.
Sometimes, trainees don't follow the usual stage progression - they go on maternity leave, take time off for research, do a fellowship in a different discipline, or take longer to complete their requirements than the usual 12-month period. When this happens, we need to adjust their schedule to reflect these events. There are usually stages in each DS (that the program inherits) that would be appropriate for these different scenarios, such as On Leave, Fellowship, Research, Transfer, etc. To add an exceptional stage to a trainee's schedule, you must first "make room" for it by shifting the existing stages forward (i.e. changing the start date of each existing stage). For example, if Lisa Aird took time off from July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013 for maternity leave, we must move the start dates for Passed and Post Graduate Years 6, 5 and 4 one year forward. This will leave you with Post Graduate Year 3 starting in 2011, and not ending until 2013. You can then click the Add Stage button to add the "On Leave" stage starting July 1, 2012.
Site admin
Sites are hospitals and clinics where the different activities take place. Program Directors can add, edit, or delete Sites from their program by going to Program > Sites. The list can be a multi-level tree, or a single, flat list. Use your mouse to drag and drop items to rearrange them. Your mouse pointer will change to show what will happen when you release the mouse button - the list item can be moved up and down, or in and out of levels of the tree. Changes are only saved when you click the 'Save' button. By default, items are sorted alphabetically in the user's language, but you may manually reorder items.
If you have several sites within one location, you can add them by clicking on the + sign. Doing so will render that 'site' not selectable, as users would be able to choose more specific sites.
Click on Sort List to enable sorting, including drag-and-drop functionality.
Don't forget to click Save!
Email reminder admin
Email reminders are used to nag trainees who have not logged or synced any activities for a specific length of time, and will remind them that they are expected to keep up with their logging. The reminders are setup to only look at the users who are in an active stage, so that users who are supposed to be inactive (graduated, on leave, on research, etc.) do not get the nagging emails. Email reminders can be accessed by going to Program > Email Reminders.
Email reminders are setup based on the number of weeks a trainee hasn't logged for (minimum 1 week, maximum 20 weeks). Reminders can be setup with varying degrees of severity, based on the length of inactivity. For example, a gently worded reminder can be setup for 1 week, a firm reminder for 2 weeks, and a stern reminder for 4 weeks. Each night, a process runs on our server that calculates the length of time that a trainee has been inactive with his/her logging based on the last activity date, and if it matches an email reminder setup in that program, it will send an email to that trainee.
Each email reminder will be triggered just once and then go "inactive" for a particular user until that user starts logging again. Below is an example of how email reminders get triggered for a program that has a 1-week, 2-week and 4-week reminder setup.
| Date | Event | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 1, 2012 | Trainee logs his last activity, then stops entering anything via web or mobile app | |
| Feb 8, 2012 | Trainee hasn't logged for 7 days. 1-week reminder triggered. | An email is sent to the trainee saying he has been inactive for a week, and reminding him to restart logging. |
| Feb 15, 2012 | Trainee hasn't logged for 14 days. 2-week reminder triggered. | A firmer reminder is sent to the trainee saying he has been inactive for two weeks, and that he should really get his act together. |
| Feb 22, 2012 | Trainee hasn't logged for 21 days. | There is no 3-week reminder setup, so nothing happens. |
| Feb 29, 2012 | Trainee hasn't logged for 28 days. 4-week reminder triggered. | A stern reminder is sent to the trainee saying he has been inactive for four weeks, and that his Program Director is probably not too impressed! |
| Any date after that | Trainee still hasn't logged anything | All the reminders have been triggered and are "inactive" at this point, so no more reminders will be sent. |
| Any date after that | Trainee enters at least one new activity via web or mobile app | All the reminders become active again, and will get triggered when the trainee stops logging |
There are several things you can customize in each email reminder setup.
- Reply-to email - Usually the Program Director or Program Admin's email. This is not connected to the email address registered with the Program Director account, so this must be updated when a new director takes over the program.
- Message - You may want to change the tone from gentle to stern, depending on how long the trainee has been inactive for. A generic message is provided by the system but it should be customized to give it some weight and make it relevant to the user (i.e. include some program contacts they can reach out to if they are having issues with logging).
- Suspended - The email reminder script will ignore this particular reminder if Suspended is checked.
- Copy to Program Director - If the trainee has been inactive for a long time (perhaps 4 weeks or longer?) it would be a good idea to copy the Program Director because it is a pretty serious gap and they should know if their trainees are not logging diligently!
- Allow opt-out - If this is checked, trainees can opt out of receiving this reminder. You should probably only check this for the 1- or 2-week reminders. The opt-out option can be seen on the Preferences page of the trainee.
Trainee admin
Trainees can be added or viewed under Program > Trainees. The page will initially show you the list of active trainees in the program, as well as their last activity and last sync dates. The trainees are grouped by stage and sorted alphabetically by last name. The trainees' usernames are also displayed, and their email can be seen by hovering over the "mailto" envelope link on the page which will show the address in your browser's status bar. Clicking on a trainee's name will take you to the View Activities page with that trainee pre-selected in the filter. To view inactive trainees, or all trainees in the program regardless of active/inactive status, change the filters at the top of the page and re-run the search.
Trainees can be added to the program by clicking on the Add New Trainee button on the View Trainees page. There are two methods for adding trainees: individually, or by importing in a specified Excel format which is useful for large numbers of trainees. The import option is only available to Sys Admin users.
Add a New Trainee is good for adding a handful of trainees. The username field will check if the username is already in use or not once you move away from that field. If you set the Starting Stage and Start Date, it will fill in the schedule for the trainee according to the usual stage schedule setup for the DS. If the Password field is left blank, a password is randomly generated by the system. Make sure the Send Welcome Email checkbox is checked when the the password is randomly generated, otherwise you will never know what the password is!
Physician admin
There are two things in T-Res that are closely related: Attending Physicians and Staff Physicians. The two are different although closely related, and it's not uncommon for newer T-Res users to get confused about which is which.
In the real world, there are physicians who are part of the hospital's teaching staff, and they are called by many different terms: attendings/attending physicians, staff physicians, preceptors, teachers, etc. These are physicians who are done their residency, have passed their accreditations etc. and are party of the teaching faculty in a health institution. In T-Res, Attending Physicians are different from a Staff Physician in a fundamental way. Staff can login and enter their own activities, while Attendings do not have an account at all. Both names, whether they fall under Attending or Staff, will appear in the "Attending Physician" pick list in the T-Res forms, but only one of them (Staff) will actually have a login to the system. Staff Physicians are also billable users when it comes time to invoice programs. Attending Physicians, though, are not billable, since they do not actually use T-Res.
As the Program Director, you can add Attending Physician names to your list, but you cannot do any admin tasks for Staff. This section deals with Attending Physician names only. If need be, Attending Physicians can be converted into a Staff account by a Sys Admin, but that is not covered in this module as it is a Sys Admin function.
Attending Physicians can be viewed under Program > Attending Physicians.
To add a name to the list, click the Create Physician button. This will check for duplicates, but of course it can only check for exact duplicates, so it won't catch instances where the same attending physician is added, except with a middle initial the second time around. You can also access the same page by clicking on Program > Create Physician. If you have a large group of physicians to add, you can work on the list using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc and then import the file. There is a template available for use.
Goal config admin
One of the fundamental features of T-Res is to allow tracking of experience against a list of required "goals" that a student must meet within a certain time period. The goals, which are the minimum number of times items must be seen/done, are managed through the Goal Config admin, under Program > Goal Configs. Goals can be tracked in a single list (e.g. list of Procedures) or double list (e.g. Procedures by Role). If an item does not need to be seen/done, the goal for that item can be zero. These goals are then used when generating reports to show which trainees are following the program requirements, and which ones need some help in meeting their minimums.
Here is a sample of a single list goal setup.
Here is a sample of a double list goal setup. A one-to-one match will be created between every single item in list 1 and list 2. Because of this, the goal config list can become quite large! To edit, click the "Enable Edit" checkbox to unlock all the textboxes so that you can enter the counts. Sometimes this process takes a very long time, depending on how many goals a program has. Take care that you keep yourself logged into T-Res (that it hasn't timed out and kicked you out of your session), otherwise it will throw away all your changes when you hit the Save button and all your work will be gone!
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