Firefly

Accelerating medical and surgical mastery

AI-driven, Personalized Learning

HIPAA-compliant

Firefly develops AI-powered tools with team expertise and experience to produce tailored services for medical and surgical training programs.

Prescriptive Learning

Get timely and actionable performance feedback, with data-driven guidance for how to improve. Track entrustability with learning curves.

Automated Case Logging

Accurate and automated case logging, saving time and hassle.

Case Analytics

Compare your case experience and performance to your educational program requirements. See where you stand against national peers.

Targeted Content

Receive high-quality, curated, relevant educational material that is matched to your clinical schedule.

Providing EPA Evaluations and Entrustability Analytics

Firefly provides Entrustable Professional Activities (EPA) evaluations for many general surgery residencies and and surgical subspecialties. These EPAs are the official EPA micro-assessments from the American Board of Surgery (ABS).

EPA FAQs:

Q: Does Firefly support the ABS' EPA initiative?

A: Yes, many residency programs an use Firefly to collect EPA mico-assessments in an automated, EHR-integrated fashion.

Q: How much does it cost to get Firefly at my program?

A: It's free. The Firefly platform is provided at no cost to all training programs by generous support from the Firefly Foundation.

Q: How much training is needed to use Firefly for the evaluations?

A: About 5-10 minutes. Most users get going right away. And to provide extra support when onboarding a new user or a new training program, we provide live walk-throughs and workshop sessions to help people practice using the platform, such as in opening and completing evaluations.

Q: Can people use the platform on their phones?

A: Yes. You can use Firefly on both your computer and your phone. The majority of faculty complete evaluations on their phones. Rather than a traditional native mobile app, Firefly uses a newer technology called a progressive web app. This has several advantages, including that users don't have to manually install it from an app store and keep updating it. The Firefly app can push security updates to user devices live, which is important for fixes and enhancements, and especially for ensuring HIPAA compliance when handling any patient data.

Q: How long does it take to complete an EPA micro-assessment?

A: The average time to complete an evaluation is under 20 seconds.

Q: What is the evaluation workflow?

A: Because Firefly integrates with hospital EHR systems, it syncs with the OR schedule and automatically requests the appropriate procedure-specific evaluations from teaching faculty after each case. The faculty member typically either fills out the evaluations immediately on their phones upon when walking out of the OR, or else at the end of the day when they have a chance to sit down at their computer. When they submit the evaluation, the Firefly system immediately notifies the resident and sends them a link to open the evaluation.

Q: If my program is already using another evaluation tool, can we still try Firefly?

A: Yes, of course. It's easy to try both and let people use whichever system they prefer. Firefly can even aggregate evaluation data across systems and show integrated analytics on your live dashboard.

Q: Does Firefly share my data?

A: No, not unless the user explicitly requests data sharing. We have been HIPAA-compliant since day one, and we take data security very seriously.

Q: How does Firefly use my data?

A: We anonymize the raw evaluation data and then use statistical models and deep learning to calculate learning curves. These curves track resident and fellow learning across hundreds of procedure types. All analytics are provided in a live dashboard back to trainees and program directors, in support of real-time optimization of learning plans. This frequent feedback cycle to trainees significantly accelerates the learning process, helping residents and fellows to become independent practicioners in their procedures much earlier.

Q: How do I get started?

A: It's easy. Just click the "Get Started" button below, and tell us you'd like to learn more. We have well-tested onboarding plans, both for single curious users and for entire training progams.

Get Started

Generously Provided by the Firefly Foundation

We have launched the Firefly Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of tomorrow's doctors. We use technology and learning theory to accelerate medical and surgical learning, supporting both educators and learners. Focusing on grant support and academic collaboration, we donate the Firefly educational platform to all residency and fellowship training programs at no cost, with the aim of empowering as many learners as possible.

For Program Directors

Accelerate your residents' learning, and measure their progress.

For Residents and Fellows

Thrive with high-quality feedback, and automate your case logging.

For Teaching Faculty, Surgeons, and Physicians

Save time and improve efficiency with AI-powered technology

For Departments & Hospitals

Increase efficiency and prevent burnout across your staff

For Accreditation and Policy in Medical Education

Use much higher-quality data for research and policies

Patented and Proven

Firefly technology and methodology has been proven across many residency programs and teaching institutions. In order to reach all medical and surgical learners, we have patent protected several important concepts:

Assigning an extrustability score or autonomy score to a medical/surgical professional or trainee
An educational data management system (platform) for tracking medical, clinical, and procedural performance
Selecting appropriate evaluations based on clinical and surgical situations, including OR schedules
Aggregating evaluations and building learning curves
Using learning curves to create learning plans
Using learning curves to measure surgical and procedural skill, autonomy, and entrustability
Using statistical and deep learning models to apply a skill/entrustability score to a medical professional
Connecting an educational platform to an EHR system, especially an OR schedule or clinical schedule
Combining an educational platform with case logging, and connecting an educational platform to a case logging system

If you would like to collaborate and/or use these helpful concepts, please feel free to reach out to us. We welcome research, academic, and industry partners to work together for our common goal of optimizing medical education.

Improve learning across your department

Academic Research

At Firefly, we and our collaborators are committed to improving medical education. We have published several peer-reviewed articles and given talks at surgical conferences, showing how an integrated medical platform helps residents learn better and become independent in the O.R. earlier.

Overcoming Systems Factors in Case Logging with Artificial Intelligence Tools

Journal of Surgical Education

2022

The Attending Meritocracy: Implementation of a Novel Team-Based Approach to Provide Effective Resident Feedback.

Journal of surgical education

(2021)

Resident Case Logs: The Untold Story

Journal of the American College of Surgeons

233.5 (2021): e171

Use of a Secure Web-Based Data Management Platform to Track Resident Operative Performance and Program Educational Quality Over Time

Journal of surgical education

77(6), (2020) e187-e195

Novel educational information management platform improves the surgical skill evaluation process of surgical residents.

Journal of surgical education

75.6 (2018): e204-e211

Education Management Platform Enables Delivery and Comparison of Multiple Evaluation Types

Journal of surgical education

76.6 (2019): e209-e216

Large-Scale Integrated Platform for Comprehensive Tracking of Resident Operative Performance

Journal of the American College of Surgeons

229.4 (2019): S245

Novel surgery resident education management platform improves case logging

Journal of the American College of Surgeons

225.4 (2017): S179

Some of our Partners

We work with several surgical departments and partners to simplify their surgeons' workflows, improve surgical education, and facilitate research projects.