Competency-based medical education and milestones assessment

Competency-based medical education (CBME) emphasizes the physician workforce capable of delivering safe, effective, and unsupervised medical care. It uses an organizing framework of competencies to the design, implementation, assessment, and evaluation of a medical education program. Milestones and entrustable professional activities (EPAs) are two common assessments used for evaluating the competencies or entrusting levels of trainees in CBME. By describing the development of competence, milestones provide a roadmap for programs and trainees, whereas the EPAs detail the competencies required for a specific work. They, therefore, complement each other. Understanding the evolution of milestones and the construction of EPAs will help us to promote and implement CBME in internal medicine. (J Intern Med Taiwan 2020; 31:115-121).