What programmatic assessment in medical education can learn from healthcare

A new approach to assessment is emerging in medical education, called programmatic assessment. Programmatic assessment is an approach in which routine information about the learner’s competence and progress is continually collected, analyzed and, where needed, complemented with purposively collected additional assessment information, with the intent to both maximally inform the learner and their mentor and allow for high-stakes decisions at the end of a training phase. For this, a variety of assessment instruments are usually used [1–3]. Programmatic assessment is being used in various medical school settings around the world and it is also becoming more popular in graduate medical education and continuing professional development [4–6]. Programmatic assessment is quite different from more traditional assessment programs with the typical ‘module-test’ building blocks focussing almost entirely on assessment of learning. We think that programmatic assessment actually makes more sense from various perspectives and we want to use analogies with clinical medicine to explain why we think so. Therefore, we will begin with a brief description of the programmatic assessment approach and