Check the Website! How We Successfully Launched a Residency Website and Why You Should Too

No one aspires to be a chief resident because responding to emails is her passion. And yet organizing and disseminating information among residency program stakeholders is a key chief resident responsibility. What if there were a way to ease the administrative burden among chief residents, support staff, and residency leadership so that more time could be spent on initiatives to improve the residency? In this workshop, presenters will reveal how a chief class utilized the Microsoft Sharepoint platform to launch a website that improved the residency program's communication, organization, and education and is now an integral and permanent fixture of the program. By displaying a resident website in real-time as a visual aid, presenters will illustrate how it provides an intuitive "one-stop shop" for residency information, from administrative forms to rotation logistics to educational resources. Presenters will then demonstrate how intentional organization of the residency's internal files on the website significantly reduced inefficiency for everyone in administrative roles. Finally, presenters will showcase how the website was used to store concise but complete outlines of every chief responsibility -- a strategy adapted from the business world called process documentation, which paid dividends when current or rising chiefs sought to understand the correct workflow for a given task. To conclude, using worksheets, self-reflection, and facilitated discussion, participants will brainstorm in small groups how they might apply the concepts we have discussed to their own programs, regardless of platform.