title: The Role of Crowdsourcing in Assessing Surgical Skills.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Assessing surgical skill is critical in improving patient care while reducing medical errors, length of stay, and readmission rates. Crowdsourcing provides 1 potential method for accurately assessing this; only recently has crowdsourcing been studied as a valid way to provide feedback to surgeons. The results of such studies are explored.
  
  
  METHODS
  A systematic literature search was performed on PubMed to identify studies that have attempted to validate crowdsourcing as a method for assessing surgical skill. Through a combination of abstract screening and full-length review, 9 studies that met the inclusion criteria were reviewed.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Crowdsourcing has been validated as an important way to provide feedback for surgical skill. It has been demonstrated to be effective in both dry-lab and live surgery, for a variety of tasks and methods. However, more studies must be performed to ensure that crowdsourcing can provide quality feedback in a wider variety of scenarios.
authors.affiliation: Department of Education, Lehigh Valley Health Network, Allentown, PA.
authors.forename: Andrew J
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Katz
mesh_terms: D002983:Clinical Competence / Q000592:standards*; D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D063045:Crowdsourcing / Q000191:economics / Q000379:methods*; D030141:Feedback, Psychological; D013502:General Surgery / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D014741:Video Recording