Coaches will facilitate an initial, individual, introductory phone call with participants prior to the first formal coaching session. The objective of this call is to develop rapport, explore each other's background, experience, and motivation for participation in the program, set overall goals for the program, set specific goals for the first coaching session, develop an action plan including identification of the key characteristics of the first case for review, and develop a timeline and plan for meetings. Peer coaching sessions will be scheduled at three national meetings that are commonly attended by ACHQC surgeons. In advance of each meeting, participants will record and upload a self-selected video to a secure server maintained by the study team, and coaches will have the opportunity to review the video if they wish to prepare. A live coaching session will be organized at the meeting where the coaches and participants will have parallel one-hour coaching sessions.

There will be no real-time interpersonal contact between coaches and participants in this arm. Participants will upload their self-selected procedural video to the video review platform, together with a short description of the case and any specific questions. The coach will review the video within one week of its posting and provide time-stamped feedback on the video platform. Participants will then review the coach's feedback within one week with the ability to respond to the comments. The coach and participant will continue communication via the internet-based review platform until no further comments are made by either party. Coach-participant dyads are expected to review three videos during the 6 month intervention period.

Surgical coaching is based on a peer coaching model that has been proven to be highly effective in other disciplines and for surgeons in training. Surgical coaching can improve technical performance in one of two ways: 1) identifying new or alternative approaches to the procedure; or 2) improving surgeon technical skill, which can lead to improvements in patient outcomes. In this proposal, our primary objective is to evaluate the effectiveness of video-based collaborative learning for surgeons.

A repeated measures ANOVA will be used to assess the Objective Structured Assessment of Technical Skills (OSATS) score between the two baseline and two follow-up measures for surgeons randomly assigned to the Coaching and Constructive Feedback intervention arms, as compared with the wait-list control group. The modified OSATS instrument is a validated rubric that assesses a surgeon's overall technical skill. Skill is measured as both a summary score on a scale from 1 (deficient) to 5 (expert), or as a total score across five subdomains (gentleness, tissue exposure, instrument handling, time and motion, flow of operation). Each domain is rated on the same 1 to 5 point Likert scale, leading to overall scores ranging from 5-25. Scoring will continue until a minimum of 15 scores are obtained for each video.

The approach to the assessment of change in Surgical Site Occurrence (SSO) rates from baseline to follow-up will be assessed similarly to technical skill; however, in this case longitudinal mixed model Poisson regression will be used, with group assignment as the primary explanatory variable. The data will be examined for over dispersion. SSO is a well-defined measure for ventral hernia repair and a composite measure of several outcomes collected through the ACHQC. This includes surgical site infection, seroma, wound dehiscence, and enterocutaneous fistula.

Intervention adherence will be assessed as the proportion of surgeon participants in each of the arms that complete all of the requisite training and sessions. Based on previous experience, an estimate of 75% of surgeons will complete all 3 sessions in the real-time coaching arm, while 50% will complete all 3 cases in the Asynchronous Feedback arm. This is the hypothesis based on challenges in prior studies in coordinating stand-alone activities with surgeons. Prior work suggests all surgeons who volunteer will participate in a minimum of one intervention component.

Another secondary analysis will assess differences in recurrence rates at one and two-years post-intervention, by comparing the Coaching and Constructive Feedback interventions to ACHQC surgeons who are neither surgeons nor coaches in this study. The analysis of long-term follow up is exploratory as a primary analysis would require that we maintain the control group without intervention for 2.5 years to ensure sufficient power, which is not feasible and could adversely impact loss-to- follow-up in the control group.