Insights from the MyProgress for Medicine User Group

On 1st May 2025, MyKnowledgeMap hosted a User Group meeting specifically for institutions using MyProgress to support medical education. The session brought together representatives from medical schools across the UK to share insights, challenges, and innovations in using the MyProgress platform for clinical education. With participants from institutions such as Leicester, Bristol, Queen's University Belfast, Ulster, Nottingham, HYMS, and more, the session offered a rich exchange of ideas focused on enhancing assessment, tracking professionalism, and managing student development in medical programmes.

Fostering Collaboration Across Institutions

The idea for this session originated from the annual MyProgress User Group, where the need for a dedicated community specifically focused on medicine was identified. With MyProgress now widely adopted across various medical and health sciences programmes, this forum aims to foster peer-to-peer learning and collaborative innovation.

Led by Terese Bird at Leicester Medical School, the different institutions shared how they have implemented MyProgress uniquely. Leicester, for example, began using the platform as early as Year 1, introducing students to the tool with an emphasis on practical benefits like tutor engagement and early skill tracking.

Leveraging the Platform: Core Use Cases

Attendees discussed how they are using MyProgress to streamline and enhance traditional educational processes. Common use cases include:

• Mandatory Clinical Skills Tracking: Ensuring students develop core competencies through structured sign-offs.

• Professionalism Agreements: Used to set behavioural expectations and monitor infractions, introduced as early as Year 1 at some schools.

• Health Passport: A static form for recording student support needs, such as exam accommodations, especially valuable during placements.

• Reflections and Tutor Feedback: Encouraging positive reinforcement and self-assessment through reflective submissions and report sharing.

• Attendance Monitoring: Still in early phases, with institutions trialling various manual and semi-automated approaches.

• ePortfolio Functionality: An optional student-owned portfolio, increasingly used for building CVs and storing certificates or commendations.

  
  

Tackling Challenges: Attendance, Assessments, and Data Analysis

Attendance Tracking

Attendance tracking was a common challenge for the institutions, with institutions describing efforts to monitor attendance in a variety of ways.

Clinical Skills Assessment

A key concern was ensuring consistent, fair assessment across many supervisors. This included discussions on grading schemes (e.g., pass/fail vs. competency levels), and whether quantity or recency of skill performance should weigh more heavily in graduation decisions.

Professionalism Infractions

The idea of implementing a system similar to LIPS (Lapses in Professionalism) was explored. While it could help track minor, repeated issues, questions remain about visibility to students and whether such data belongs in the student-owned portfolio.

Hours Reporting

Medical schools also raised the issue of how best to track student practice hours, a process more rigorously applied in nursing and midwifery. Enhancing support for this within MyProgress is an area under development.

Data Analytics

Several universities are using tools like Power BI to extract and interpret MyProgress data, providing dashboards and visualisations that support curriculum mapping and performance monitoring.

A Look Ahead: Project Odin and Platform Enhancements

Exciting developments were previewed during the session, most notably Project Odin, an initiative to integrate ePortfolio functionality directly into MyProgress. This will give students a personal, long-term portfolio space within the platform. The feature is expected to roll out by the end of the academic year, enabling smoother transitions into the 2025–26 academic cycle.

Additionally, MyKnowledgeMap is continuing work on improving reporting features, enhancing data dashboards, and exploring better ways to track professionalism through dedicated forms or workflows.

What’s Next for the User Group?

The meeting concluded with a commitment to ongoing collaboration. Planned next steps include:

• Exploring demos of LIPS-like functionality and new portfolio features.

• Sharing best practices in clinical skills assessment and data visualisation.

Final Thoughts

This first gathering of the MyProgress for Medicine User Group marked a significant step forward in medical education collaboration. It reinforced the value of shared knowledge in navigating platform challenges, showcased the flexibility of MyProgress across varied contexts, and highlighted a collective drive to innovate. With continuous engagement and platform evolution, this community is poised to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of medical education delivery.