Surgery Boot Camp
Surgical Proficiency. Faster, safer.
Introduction
Surgery Boot Camp accelerates how novice surgeons gain technical skills. Our digital platform uses deliberate practice, real-time feedback, and validated proficiency benchmarks to help trainees reach competency faster -- proven at Harvard and ready to scale nationwide.
Problem
Surgical trainees enter residency with widely different levels of technical preparation, and programs struggle to close that gap efficiently. There is no standardized, objective way to see how much practice a trainee is doing, where they struggle, or how quickly they are improving. Faculty rely on limited in-person observation, which is inconsistent, time-intensive, and hard to scale. Program directors want clearer indicators of readiness for the operating room, but current systems provide little actionable data.
We are solving this for program directors, surgical faculty, and institutions responsible for ensuring trainees reach competence early. We also support incoming residents and advanced practice providers who need structured, efficient ways to build foundational skills. By giving programs and insight into performance trends and giving novice surgeons focused guidance, we reduce variability, improve preparedness, and shift the learning curve.
Opportunity
Our solution is a digital platform that creates a structured, measurable pathway for acquiring surgical technical skills. It includes a web-based practice tracker, validated proficiency benchmarks, error logging, progress curves, and faculty dashboards showing individual and cohort performance. It supports deliberate practice on low-cost task trainers, and a mobile version is in development for real-time logging and personalized feedback.
We have over a decade of proof-of-concept data from Harvard Medical School, where this tool was used in the Surgery Boot Camp course and showed that structured digital tracking increases skills mastered and shortens time to proficiency. We use validated proficiency standards rather than time-based milestones, combined with motivational tools such as leaderboards and streak tracking to encourage consistent practice. This gamification accelerates skill acquisition.