DME Health Professions Education (HPE) Faculty

Rachel Yudkowsky, MD, MHPE

Professor and Director of Graduate Studies Department of Medical Education

Work Phone: 312-996-3598 Work Email: rachely@uic.edu Website: Curriculum Vitae

Biographical Info

Rachel Yudkowsky is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Medical
Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine. She served as Director of
the Dr Allan L and Mary L Graham Clinical Performance Center from 2000-2018, where she
developed standardized patient and simulation-based programs for the instruction and assessment
of students, residents and staff. She also served as Director of the University of Illinois Health
Sciences Simulation Consortium from 2009-2018.

Dr. Yudkowsky received her MD from Northwestern University Medical School in 1979 and is
Board Certified in Psychiatry. She obtained her Master of Health Professions Education (MHPE)
degree from UIC in 2000. She served as medical student psychiatry clerkship director, psychiatry
residency program director, and director of education for the Evanston Hospital Department of
Psychiatry, and as associate director of graduate medical education for the Department of
Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Northwestern University Medical School before joining
the faculty of DME in 1999.

Dr. Yudkowsky served as Chair of the Research and Grants Committee of the Association of
Standardized Patient Educators (ASPE) from 2007-2009. She was the founding co-President of
the Chicago Simulation Consortium (CSC) in 2013, and served as Chair of the CSC Professional
Development Committee from 2015-2017. She served on the Editorial Board of the journal
Simulation in Healthcare from 2008-2017, and as an Associate Editor from 2015-2017. She
received the Outstanding Educator Award from ASPE in 2009, and the Society for Simulation in
Healthcare Standardized Patient SIG Award in 2016. Her book Assessment in Health Professions
Education, co-edited with Steven Downing, was published by Routledge in 2009; the 2nd edition
of the book, co-edited with Yoon Soo Park, was published in 2019.
Areas of research interest include performance assessment using standardized patients and other
simulations, especially for physical exam skills, communication skills, clinical reasoning, and
basic procedural skills; and setting passing standards for performance tests.

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ORCID: 0000-0002-2145-7582, 0000-0002-2145-7582
Research and Teaching Interests: Dr. Yudkowsky’s teaching interests are in the scholarship of Health Professions Education and professional development programs for faculty and staff who develop and implement standardized patient (SP)-based educational programs (SP educator certificate program, and others). Research interests focus on simulation-based assessments: (1) promoting and assessing clinical reasoning through SP encounters (exploring methods to assess clinical reasoning through post-encounter notes and promoting clinical reasoning while teaching and assessing physical exam skills via a hypothesis-driven physical exam); (2) setting pass/fail cut scores for simulation-based assessments, especially in mastery-learning environments (How does benchmark performance information provided to judges need to be modified for a repeated-testing mastery environment? What is the impact on standard setting judgments of different benchmark information, or other evidence-based information?); and (3) improving SP checklist and rating scale design by focusing on high-salience items for a given purpose (for example clinically discriminating items or high salience communication items).

Categories: Department of Medical Education, DME Faculty, Master of Health Professions Education