Audience response for case conferences and grand rounds

Put the case up, ask the room what they would do, and see the split before you say what happened. Clinicians answer anonymously on their own phones, results appear on your screen as they arrive, and nobody creates an account.

The question nobody answers honestly

"So what would everyone start here?" In a room with attendings, residents and medical students, that question has a cost attached. A trainee who names the wrong agent in front of the person writing their reference has learned something about the room, not about the case. So the confident answer comes from the same two people every week, everyone else nods, and the session runs on the assumption that the room agrees.

Anonymous polling removes the cost. The answer is a data point rather than a public commitment, so people tell you what they actually think — including the ones who are unsure, who are the reason you are teaching.

Ask before you reveal

The useful order is to poll first and explain second. Present the history, the imaging, the labs, then ask the room to commit to a management decision before you say what the team did. Committing to an answer changes how people listen to the explanation that follows: they are checking their own reasoning rather than watching yours.

If the results are already on the screen while people vote, the first answers to land pull the undecided toward them. Reveal, part of Pro, hides the results when you press H, and from then on every question opens with its results hidden until you press H again to show them. Press it on the first question before anyone answers, and the room commits without a running tally to follow, then sees the split all at once.

The split is the teaching material. If the room divides evenly between two reasonable options, that division is the discussion, and it is a better discussion than the one you planned. If 70% pick the same wrong option, you have found a specific shared misconception and you can address that instead of the general talk you prepared.

A poll per decision point, not a questionnaire

Cases have several moments where the path forks: what is the working diagnosis, what do you order next, do you treat now or wait, when do you reassess. Each of those is its own question, asked at the moment it arises. Running them as one long form at the end collects opinions from people who already know the answer, because you have already told them.

Creating a survey takes about twenty seconds, so a session can carry six or eight of them without preparation becoming a project. Sessions in this pattern reliably draw answers from most of the room, because each question costs the respondent a few seconds while the case is still on screen. With Present, each one goes on the big screen by itself, in type the back row of a lecture hall can read.

Confidence is the measure that matters

Asking whether people understood invites them to say yes. Asking how confident they would be managing this patient on a 1–10 scale gets an answer people can give honestly, because they know it. A mean below six after your explanation means the explanation has not finished, whatever the multiple choice showed. A rating question shows the full 1 to 10 distribution with the average and median, so you can tell a room clustered at five from one split between two and nine, and those call for different fixes.

This also works as a before-and-after: the same confidence question at the start and end of a session measures what the session actually moved, which is harder to argue with than an attendance sheet.

Anonymous means anonymous

Responses carry no identifier — no name, no email, no account, and nothing that ties an answer back to a person. That is a property of how the tool stores data rather than a promise in a settings page. It matters most in exactly the room this is built for, where the people most worth hearing from are the most junior.

Worth saying out loud before the first question: answers are not identifiable and nobody will be asked to justify theirs. A room that suspects otherwise answers strategically, and strategic answers teach you nothing.