The study tested whether feedback from everyday people, not doctors or faculty could help residents get better at one of the hardest conversations in medicine: telling a patient that an error occurred. Residents from seven U.S. training programs completed simulated error-disclosure scenarios and recorded what they would say. Half of them then received personalized feedback generated from crowdsourced laypeople who rated their communication. When all residents repeated a similar simulation weeks later, those who had received this outside feedback improved noticeably more than those who didn’t.

The big takeaway is that hearing how regular people perceive their communication seemed to make residents better at explaining mistakes with empathy, clarity, and accountability especially for trainees who had never disclosed a real medical error before. The authors suggest this approach is practical, scalable, and could help residency programs teach error-disclosure skills more consistently, since real-life opportunities are unpredictable and often stressful.