3 ways to make the most of your curriculum committee meeting minutes

Lois Margaret Nora, MD, JD, MBA

The LCME has long asked schools to include two years’ worth of curriculum committee meeting minutes for site visitor review during the medical school accreditation process. More recently, they have started requesting that these documents be searchable.

Minutes themselves cannot be changed. However, some simple steps — and a thoughtful approach to future meetings — can help optimize these documents for review by accreditors and, as importantly, for memorializing the committee’s work for the school itself.  

Speak the language of the LCME

Schools understandably have internal terminology that speaks to their history, culture, and processes. Sometimes these align closely with LCME terminology, but not always. Consider a term the LCME might be looking for in your curriculum committee minutes, such as program outcomes. Your committee may be reviewing these outcomes, but if minutes do not use this term, a search for “program outcomes” will turn up nothing of note — potentially suggesting a gap in the committee’s work.

Deliberately integrating LCME terminology into your minutes will help ensure that a site visitor who searches your documentation lands on all the relevant content. One way to do this is to start using the LCME terminology throughout your minutes. Explicitly use terms from the elements and standards like program outcomes (8.4), narrative assessment (9.5), mid-clerkship feedback (9.4), and formative assessment (9.6). 

Leverage keywords

The approach described above works for optimizing minutes going forward. But some schools will be sharing minutes from meetings that have already been completed. To optimize existing minutes, a different approach is needed.

Consider revisiting past minutes to see if key search terms are used.  If so, no changes are needed. However, if you find that key topics were discussed but these references are unlikely to be found with a search that uses LCME terminology, you can consider assigning keywords to the corresponding minutes based on the content of the meeting. Borrowing from the previous example, if minutes indicate that cohort data on course performance, NBME results, and residency program director surveys were discussed in a meeting, a keyword such as program outcomes could be attached to the minutes, enabling a site visitor to quickly locate the documentation. 

The prospect of sifting through old meeting minutes to make them more accessible for searching may be overwhelming, but it does not necessarily require intensive word-for-word review. One simple place to start is by looking at the agenda for each meeting. Identify the themes, scan the notes to ensure the themes were in fact discussed (and that documentation is adequate), then add the relevant keywords or phrases.  Remember that meeting minutes should not be changed.  However, the curriculum committee can decide to add a “keywords” section to the minutes and direct that past minutes (at least for the past year or so) be reviewed so keywords can be added. Agreement around the addition of keywords should also be documented in the minutes from the meeting at which that decision is made. 

As your team aligns around keywords, these can also be assigned for future meetings to keep themes top of mind and accessible, and presentation of minutes consistent.

Include the right level of detail

When reviewing the content of your meeting minutes, it is a good idea to also review your process for meeting minutes more generally to ensure it is serving the committee and school as well as possible.  For example, some committees document meeting activities in such a limited way that the minutes reflect little other than that the issue was discussed.  Other committees document activities exhaustively (e.g., even to the level of a complete transcript) to ensure nothing gets lost. Both types of minutes can create problems.

We recommend including enough detail in minutes to truly inform future readers about the nature of a discussion without burying key points. A simple sentence noting which issues the committee discussed does not tell the reader what really happened in a meeting, but a full transcript may not adequately spotlight the most important pieces. Consider documenting the themes that were discussed, with a reasonable amount of detail about each: the perspectives considered, the consensus achieved, and which next steps were identified.

Thinking beyond curriculum committee minutes and accreditation

Although the LCME only requires the submission of searchable curriculum committee minutes at this time, schools may also benefit from applying the ideas discussed above to other committee minutes. Consider the CQI committee, for example. Schools monitor work on a variety of LCME elements as part of CQI, and these activities are often discussed in meetings. If your school is working toward enhancements to the academic advising program, for example, a quick search of well-optimized CQI committee minutes could pull up the date and reasons for starting on the initiative, the steps taken to enhance academic advising functions, and the outcomes documented as a result. Such information could be helpful for demonstrating compliance with CQI requirements and more importantly, telling the story of your institution’s ongoing improvements.

The complexity of accreditation — and indeed medical school administration — means processes large and small can make a difference in your ability to complete work, achieve your goals, and avoid burnout. Meeting minutes may be under the radar of many professionals, but leaders who embrace opportunities to examine and optimize processes of all types are well-positioned to improve the function of their teams and reinforce a culture of continuous quality improvement.