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Made by residents, for residencies

The best feedback
never made it to the form.

DebriefMD exists because the best feedback in medical training happens in a conversation, not in a form. Preceptors and residents talk after almost every encounter. That’s where the real learning happens. The form comes afterwards, and often it never comes at all.

The story

Why this exists.

“My preceptor gave me the best feedback in person. None of it made it to the form.”

DebriefMD began with a resident in British Columbia, watching the same thing happen on every rotation: a preceptor gives rich, specific, immediately useful verbal feedback right after a case, and what does get written down rarely captures it.

What gets written down is the form: generic boxes, filled in days later from memory, with whichever trainee happened to come to mind that week. The actual feedback, the part that would have changed how the trainee practices tomorrow, lives in the hallway and then disappears.

The pattern was always the same, and it was always in one direction. Whatever ended up in writing was shorter than the conversation that produced it. Five minutes of specific, situated advice became two lines of “good clinical reasoning, keep reading around cases.” Nothing was falsified. It was just thinned, every time, until the record said much less than the teaching had.

That gap between what’s said and what’s documented is the whole reason this product exists. Every design decision comes back to it: we don’t ask clinicians to do more typing, we don’t ask residents to chase preceptors for paperwork, and we don’t let a rating stand in for the words that justify it. We just preserve the conversation, scrub what shouldn’t be there, and hand the resident a draft to review before any of it counts for anything.

We are taking on pilot programs now.

One program, its own form template, one rotation block, scoped with you before anything starts. Feedback from the residents and preceptors in a pilot cohort shapes every release.

Talk to us about a pilot

Mission

Preserve the feedback that already happens.

Our mission is to preserve the high-quality verbal feedback that already happens in clinical training, and turn it into a formal record without making clinicians fill out one more form. We capture the conversation, remove any patient identifiers that might have slipped in, and map what was said to the competency framework your program uses. The resident reviews everything before it becomes official. No automation without oversight.

What we believe

Five things we keep coming back to.

  • Preceptors should talk, not type.

    Clinicians already give high-quality verbal feedback. The problem isn’t quality; it’s that nothing captures it. A busy preceptor should not have to choose between a good conversation and a completed form.

  • Residents deserve specific feedback.

    A rating with nothing behind it isn’t feedback. What residents need is what was actually said: specific observations, concrete suggestions, clear strengths. Verbal feedback already contains all of that. We preserve it, so a rating arrives with the words that justify it.

  • Assessment data should reflect what was actually said.

    Competency ratings filled in from memory, days after an encounter, reflect the form, not the case. Data drawn directly from the conversation is more accurate, more specific, and more useful for the resident and the program.

  • People over process.

    Competency-based training was meant to serve residents and preceptors, and somewhere along the way they started serving it: more forms, more checkboxes, more chasing. We are not here to add another system on top. Every decision is measured against whether it gives time back to the two people in the conversation, and anything that only moves the work around does not ship.

  • Canadian training data stays in Canada.

    We store and process everything on Canadian infrastructure. This wasn’t a feature added at the end; it’s how the system was designed from day one.

Talk to us.

If you run a residency program, or you are a resident with opinions about assessment, we want to hear from you.

hello@debriefmd.ca