Lead Author: Easton N. Wollney
Submitted by: Amy Lorion, NBOME

This article purports to be a comparison between two types of raters, SPs and “outside observers with training in healthcare communication,” with the evidence demonstrating that the SPs were more lenient in their scoring on both subjective items (e.g., “used effective body language”) and objective items (e.g., “The resident told the patient she should not start smoking again”). However, as the authors acknowledge partway through the article, there was another glaring factor: the SPs only scored the encounters live, based on memory, and the non-SP observers only scored the encounters via recorded videos; hence, “evaluator type was tied to evaluator method in this study.” This article is worth reading—the differences between the groups’ scores are telling and support several of the discussion points (e.g., cognitive load)—despite the mixed approach which undercuts the assertion that it’s a comparison of rater types per se.

Read the full article in PEC Innovation here.

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