PAACS Training Platform — Phase 1 Scope

Every requirement from your email, placed by how it gets met:

Left — Phase 1 build: we build it in the 10-week engagement
Middle — Microsoft 365: your existing setup already does it — we configure, not build
Right — Deferred / decision: Phase 2, or waiting on a decision or a missing example
Twelve boxes, but not one per requirement — some are grouped, and theatre reports we added ourselves

Click any item for detail. We'll walk through Resident Evaluations, Reminders and Offline & Mobile together — the rest are here to read afterwards.

Your twelve requirements

All twelve are accounted for. Nothing dropped.

1Resident EvaluationsRegular performance evaluations, progress tracking over time, feedback from program directors, faculty, and supervisors.

2Spiritual Self-AssessmentStructured forms, documentation of spiritual development, confidentiality with clearly defined access.

3Conference ReportsSubmission and review, attendance tracking, automated reminders for outstanding reports.

4Rotation ReportsCompleted rotations, rotation-specific evaluations, overview of completed / current / upcoming.

5Examination ResultsScore recording, per-resident summaries, comparison over time, flagging residents needing support.

6Central DashboardEverything per resident in one place; indicators for complete / pending / overdue; program-wide statistics.

7Task & To-Do ManagementIndividual and shared task lists, assignment, deadlines, reminders, completion tracking.

8Integrated CalendarRotations, exams, conferences, meetings, deadlines; personal and org-wide views; notifications.

9Policies & FAQCentral repository for current policies, guidelines and procedures, searchable FAQs, clear version control and notification when policies are updated.

10Communication ToolsCommunication between residents, program directors, faculty, country programs, and PAACS headquarters; group announcements and individual messages.

11AI-Assisted FunctionsIntelligent search, automated progress summaries, flagging of missing reports or declining performance, drafting help — with privacy controls and human review.

12Administration & SecurityRole-based access, secure handling of personal and evaluation data, configurable reports and data export, mobile-friendly and reliable on limited connectivity.

Phase 1 Microsoft 365 Deferred / decision needed Split: search, cited answers and access control now — summaries and offline in Phase 2

In scope / not in scope

Phase 1 — in scope

Find everything — a full inventory of what forms exist, where they live, and who can currently see them
Read the forms automatically — every form that carries the resident record, once we can see them all (eight in hand today, with eight more in one library alone). Once we've tuned against real filled examples, the target is that at least 95% of existing files read correctly on the first pass; anything that doesn't lands on a short review list rather than being silently misread
Match people up — the same resident or faculty member spelled different ways across programs
Reorganize SharePoint — one place per program and per resident, each file tagged with the resident, program and period it belongs to
Correct access per role — you see your own program, HQ sees all; spiritual assessments and the monthly M&M form (patient names) locked tightest
Ask-a-Question agent — for you and for HQ, answering with a link to the source document
Automatic reminders — built from PAACS's own Task Schedule, plus a view of what's been received and what hasn't
First dashboard — status per resident and per program
Pilot with 2–3 programs — training and a written handover
Your records stay in your Microsoft 365 environment — no new system of record, nothing migrated to a platform you don't control, and nothing that already exists has to be re-typed to get it in

Not in Phase 1

Offline and mobile form-filling — the core of Phase 2
AI summaries, drafting and flagging — Phase 2
Cross-program analytics and automatic accreditor / donor reports — Phase 2
Connecting to WWLab — pending a decision
Exam results — pending an example
Custom task, calendar and messaging tools — Planner, Outlook and Teams instead
Redesigning the forms — Phase 1 digitizes them exactly as they are
Rollout beyond the pilot programs — a separate effort once the pilots work

10-week timeline

Stage

Find everythingwhat forms exist, where, who sees them

Read the formsone setup per form; match up names

Reorganize + secureone place per resident; access per role

Reminders + ask-a-questionautomatic chase-ups; first dashboard

Pilot + hand over2–3 programs live, training, next steps

Where we'd come back to you: Wk 2 — what we found, including who can currently see what · Wk 5 — sign-off on the new structure and access rules, and agreement to hold the forms steady (the decision point that gates everything after it) · Wk 8 — the first automatic reminders go out, and the first dashboard · Wk 10 — what adoption looks like, and what's worth doing next.
Stages overlap in practice; shown separately for clarity. Roughly a few hours a week from a PAACS admin throughout, and 2–3 hours a week from each pilot program director from week 5 onwards, heaviest in the last two weeks.

What we need

From you — the day-to-day · what you see that nobody else does

What comes out of the Residency Review Committee meeting?

This is our biggest open question. Your Task Schedule says the Biannual Evaluation Form gets filled during that meeting, so we know where the form goes in — we don't know what comes out. What does the committee produce per resident, who sees it, and what does it drive: promotion to the next year, a remediation plan, something sent to HQ? One completed example, even hand-made and anonymized, tells us what the system has to produce. Every design decision downstream follows from it.

Where do the filled-in forms actually end up?

The @FORMS library we've seen holds blank templates only — no per-resident folders. The Task Schedule says to "place in Microsoft 365 shared folder or send to PAACS admin," which suggests a lot of them arrive by email and land wherever the recipient puts them. So: when you finish a biannual evaluation, where does the file physically go, and would you say most programs do the same thing? This decides how much history there is to work with, and it's the answer most likely to change how we sequence the work.

2–3 filled-in examples of each form

Seven of the eight samples we have are blank templates. Real forms always differ from the blank version, and we can't confirm the system reads them correctly without a few real ones. Anonymized is fine.

The rest of the forms

We have 8 files. The @FORMS > Resident Evaluations library holds nine, of which we've only seen the biannual workbook — the COSECSA Trainee Assessment, the Anesthesia Rotation Checklist, the Orthopaedic and Endoscopy variants, Surgical Skills, a print version of the biannual and the Short Form in two formats we haven't. The Task Schedule names more again (conference report, short-term faculty forms, the budget form). Easiest is access to the libraries rather than sending files one by one.

Where the current process actually breaks

Which reports arrive late and why, what you chase every cycle, what you re-enter by hand, what you'd stop doing tomorrow. This is what shapes the reminders and the dashboard — we'd rather build them around what actually happens than around the process on paper.

Do your programs actually use Teams, Planner and Outlook?

Requirements 7, 8 and 10 are the ones we'd configure rather than build. That only works if people already live in those tools. If they don't, we need to know now.

Exam results — what exists, and who holds it

Requirement 5 is the one with no example at all. Your Task Schedule covers registering trainees for COSECSA, ECSACOG and CANECSA — MCS by October 31 and FCS by February 1 for COSECSA, with the other two colleges' dates still marked "to be reviewed" — but nothing about where the scores come back to. Even knowing whether they arrive as a spreadsheet, an email, or only on each college's website is enough to move forward.

Anything we should know about how resident and patient data is handled

Rules you already work under, or expectations from the hospitals and countries you operate in. The ownership question sits with PAACS, but you're closest to what actually happens with these forms day to day.

How theatre reports get recorded today

Your Task Schedule points to WWLab for the monthly M&M figures. Who enters them, who reads them, and does anything come back out of that system into your reporting? Whether we connect to it is a separate decision — this is just how it works today.

For PAACS leadership and IT · nothing needed from you here — we'll follow these up separately

Data protection — who owns it at PAACS?

This handles personal data on every resident, and the monthly M&M form carries patient names by design. Your files stay in SharePoint. Our tooling reads them to pull out the answers, and those answers land in SharePoint lists in the same environment — nothing moves to a system outside PAACS's control. We'd want to agree in writing what we read and what we store. Someone at PAACS needs to own the consent and retention question, and we'd rather raise it now than at the end.

Five things to settle at HQ level

Access to your Microsoft 365 environment — a standard admin permission so our tools can read the SharePoint files, an introduction to whoever administers it, and a deliberate choice between the two ways Microsoft charges for the question-answering feature.
Theatre reports: connect, or leave out? — a scope decision rather than a technical one. We'd rather have an explicit "not now" than assume.
Pilot programs, and holding the forms steady — two or three programs to start, ideally one that's keen and one that will push back hardest, since the second is the useful test. Plus agreement that the form templates don't change while we're building against them.
Agreement on what gets configured rather than built — tasks, calendar and messaging handled with Planner, Outlook and Teams. A deliberate choice about where the effort goes, worth saying out loud at HQ level rather than assuming.
Someone to own the review list — files that don't match a known form version need a PAACS-side owner to work through them. Small job, but the build stalls without a name against it.