Due to the COVID‐19 pandemic, in‐person educational activities for emergency medicine (EM) residents were suspended. As a result, we developed a virtual point‐of‐care ultrasound (POCUS) course for incoming EM interns consisting of online didactics and faculty‐proctored hands‐on scan sessions utilizing a video conferencing platform and a handheld smartphone‐compatible ultrasound transducer. Learners found the course to be effective in improving their POCUS knowledge and scanning skills. Feedback obtained from this course will allow us to improve future virtual courses.

Emergency medicine educators are subject to external pressures to increase clinical productivity while maintaining quality teaching. Strategies to mitigate this perceived conflict include alterations in staffing and incentive compensation with educational value units. There is a paucity of information describing the effect of clinical demands on teaching metrics in emergency medicine. We performed a narrative review of the literature describing the relationship between clinical productivity and teaching evaluations of emergency medicine faculty and residents. We searched PubMed and Google Scholar for peer-reviewed articles describing emergency medicine clinical productivity metrics, teaching metrics, and the relationship between them. Seven articles met inclusion criteria. While most articles utilized relative value units (RVUs) per hour, other outcomes metrics were heterogeneous. Almost all studies utilized retrospective data and took place at academic teaching hospitals. Despite variability in statistical analysis, no studies found a relationship between clinical productivity and teaching metrics. Multiple articles identified characteristics of faculty that were associated with improved teaching metrics independent of clinical demands. The available literature does not support the concept that increased clinical productivity conflicts with quality teaching. A subset of faculty was identified who excelled at both. Next research steps should include developing shared standards for assessment of clinical productivity and educational quality that can be used to collect data at multiple sites at academic and community clinical settings; a secondary outcome includes measuring the effects of additional teaching attendings and educational value units.

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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has produced substantial impacts on our society. Wastewater surveillance has increasingly been introduced to support the monitoring, and thus mitigation, of COVID-19 outbreaks and transmission. Monitoring of buildings and sub-sewershed areas via a wastewater surveillance approach has been a cost-effective strategy for mass testing of residents in congregate living situations such as universities. A series of spatial and spatiotemporal data are involved with wastewater surveillance, and these data must be interpreted and integrated with other information to better serve as guidance on response to a positive wastewater signal. The management and analysis of these data poses a significant challenge, in particular, for the need of supporting timely decision making. In this study, we present a web-based spatial decision support system framework to address this challenge. Our study area is the main campus of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. We develop a spatiotemporal data model that facilitates the management of space-time data related to wastewater surveillance. We use spatiotemporal analysis and modeling to discover spatio-temporal patterns of COVID-19 virus abundance at wastewater collection sites that may not be readily apparent in wastewater data as they are routinely collected. Web-based GIS dashboards are implemented to support the automatic update and sharing of wastewater testing results. Our web-based SDSS framework enables the efficient and automated management, analytics, and sharing of spatiotemporal data of wastewater testing results for our study area. This framework provides substantial support for informing critical decisions or guidelines for the prevention of COVID-19 outbreak and the mitigation of virus transmission on campus.

Background Qualitative research explains observations, focusing on how and why phenomena and experiences occur. Qualitative methods go beyond quantitative data and provide critical information inaccessible through quantitative methods. However, at all levels of medical education, there is insufficient exposure to qualitative research. As a result, residents and fellows complete training ill‐equipped to appraise and conduct qualitative studies. As a first step to increasing education in qualitative methods, we sought to create a curated collection of papers for faculty to use in teaching qualitative research at the graduate medical education (GME) level. Methods We conducted literature searches on the topic of teaching qualitative research to residents and fellows and queried virtual medical education and qualitative research communities for relevant articles. We searched the reference lists of all articles found through the literature searches and online queries for additional articles. We then conducted a three‐round modified Delphi process to select papers most relevant to faculty teaching qualitative research. Results We found no articles describing qualitative research curricula at the GME level. We identified 74 articles on the topic of qualitative research methods. The modified Delphi process identified the top nine articles or article series most relevant for faculty teaching qualitative research. Several articles explain qualitative methods in the context of medical education, clinical care, or emergency care research. Two articles describe standards of high‐quality qualitative studies, and one article discusses how to conduct the individual qualitative interview to collect data for a qualitative study. Conclusions While we identified no articles reporting already existing qualitative research curricula for residents and fellows, we were able to create a collection of papers on qualitative research relevant to faculty seeking to teach qualitative methods. These papers describe key qualitative research concepts important in instructing trainees as they appraise and begin to develop their own qualitative studies.

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