Medical schools face a unique challenge in supporting faculty careers. What stands out about medical faculty is that they often have two careers, one as practitioners and another as educators. While they’re balancing patient care, research, and teaching, they’re also navigating the complex path toward advancement through promotion and tenure. It’s no surprise that these dual roles can make university processes feel even more fragmented, opaque, and time-consuming for both faculty and administrators.
It doesn’t have to be this way. With modern higher education solutions that streamline data collection and review processes, medical schools can simplify P&T review cycles, surface meaningful insights, and give faculty the recognition they deserve. A smarter, data-informed approach, powered by Watermark Faculty Success and Course Evaluations & Surveys, can help institutions improve transparency, align with strategic goals, and elevate both faculty and institutional performance and reputation. An integrated approach ensures that faculty not only manage their activities efficiently but also receive actionable feedback and can apply it to enhance their teaching and impact and advance their careers.
Elevating academic medicine with Faculty Success
For medical faculty, documenting achievements across teaching, research, clinical practice, and service is a requirement that feels like a second full-time job. Faculty Success provides a centralized system to manage faculty data, streamline workflows, and improve the quality of promotion and tenure documentation.
Faculty Success enables medical schools to:
- Guide faculty career paths with clear visual timelines, milestones, and requirements to support career advancement and retention.
- Simplify faculty activity reporting and boost recognition of their faculty’s varied contributions, including research, scholarship, clinical work, teaching, and service.
- Keep a pulse on the productivity and impact of their faculty.
- Ensure fairness and consistency in reviews using data-informed academic performance indicators and customizable evaluation criteria.
- Elevate the profile of medical faculty by showcasing their credentials, expertise, and achievements on automatically-updated web profiles.
For medical schools balancing heavy workloads and complex reporting needs, Faculty Success can improve efficiency and help faculty spend more time on instruction, mentorship, and patient care.
Elevating teaching and learning with the help of Course Evaluations & Surveys
Beyond tracking achievements, understanding and responding to student experiences is vital for faculty growth and effectiveness. Course Evaluations & Surveys (CES) empowers medical faculty to keep a pulse on their students’ needs and experiences, enabling responsive adjustments that improve satisfaction and outcomes.
With CES, medical schools can:
- Tailor evaluations to the complexity of medical curricula, from multi-faculty courses to clinical rotations, for accurate, efficient feedback.
- Give busy faculty quick, AI-powered reports that turn feedback into clear, actionable insights for immediate teaching improvement.
- Run mid-term or pulse surveys to inspire timely, in-course adjustments and continuous quality improvement.
- Equip deans and chairs with detailed reports that highlight feedback trends and guide targeted faculty support.
- Integrate student voice into promotion and tenure reviews to present a full picture of teaching alongside clinical and research work.
- Help faculty showcase their impact with data-backed evidence of teaching excellence and student success.
By providing faculty with clear visibility into their teaching impact and offering tools for continuous improvement, CES fosters a culture of pedagogical excellence that directly supports faculty advancement and student success in academic medicine.
A smarter, more supportive future for academic medicine
The future of faculty affairs in medical schools depends on connected data, consistent evaluation, and a commitment to faculty engagement and development. With Watermark, institutions can reduce administrative friction, promote fairness in evaluation, and strengthen institutional excellence.
When medical schools empower faculty with clear visibility into their contributions and impact on students, they not only improve institutional accountability but also create a healthier environment for teaching, research, and community-based instruction.
Discover how Watermark Faculty Success and Course Evaluations & Surveys can help your institution take a smarter, data-informed approach to faculty advancement.
