ABS vs Debrief.

The ABS offers the general surgery residency exam annually. The In-Training Examination (ABSITE®), is a multiple-choice exam designed to measure the progress attained by residents in their knowledge of applied science and management of clinical problems related to surgery. The ABSITE is furnished to program directors as an evaluation instrument to assess residents' progress. The results are released only to program directors. It is not available to individuals and is not required as part of the board certification process. The ABSITE is administered solely online using each program's own computer facilities. The exam is presented in one five-hour block; examinees may return to past questions during the exam.

Capture medicine in your own voice. You don't forget the patient. You forget what you learned from the patient. You finish a long shift able to name three patients on the walk to your car, and by morning they've blurred into a single feeling of fullness, mostly gone. Debrief is built to keep what the day taught you. Talk the way you'd tell a friend who was there. No structure, no script. Debrief turns a few minutes of talking into a structured entry: a summary, the cases you saw, the clinical pearls worth keeping, your growth moments, and the things you said you'd look up. It's the write-up you'd have done with two more hours. Then it helps you hold onto it. The pearls you mentioned in passing come back as flashcards, on the same spaced-repetition algorithm behind Anki. You quiz yourself on the medicine you saw on shift, not the medicine in a textbook, and the cards you miss come back sooner. HOW IT WORKS 1. Talk. Whether it's 30 seconds or 30 minutes, record a voice debrief whenever your day winds down. Some rooms aren't for voice memos, so you can also jot it down in the built-in scratchpad. 2. Review. Get an organized entry: cases, clinical pearls, growth moments, and follow-ups to chase. Every entry files itself under the right rotation on its own. 3. Remember. Lessons return as flashcards on a spaced schedule tuned to how well you knew them, timed to bring them back right before you'd forget. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Build a searchable library of every patient you've seen, by rotation. Find the case from three weeks ago by the way you described it then, not the way you'd describe it now. • Get answers backed by sources. Every "I should look that up" becomes a real answer, drawn from clinical references and saved next to the case that raised it. • Close the loop. Tick a follow-up off your list and it comes back as a quiz card, so looking something up once means keeping it. • See your own growth across rotations, in your own words. • Record offline in the stairwell or the basement. Debrief uploads the moment you're back online. WHO IT'S FOR Medical students and residents who learn the most from real patients and want a way to keep it. A question bank hands you fresh vignettes by the hundred. Your own service handed you a few real ones today, with a tone of voice and a family in the room. Debrief makes those patients teach you twice: once at the bedside, and again weeks later when it counts. PRIVACY Debrief keeps what they taught you, not who they were. It's built to keep patient identifiers out of your notes, working to strip names, dates, and record numbers, and asking you to leave them out when you talk. It isn't a medical record, and it isn't medical advice. It's a place to think out loud about your training and hold onto what the work is teaching you. Debrief is free while we're getting started. Debrief your shift, and turn the day you just lived through into something you can learn from.