Continuing patient care to underserved communities and medical education during the COVID‐19 pandemic through a teledermatology student‐run clinic

Abstract

A virtual pediatric dermatology student‐run clinic was initiated during the COVID‐19 pandemic, when in‐person educational opportunities were limited. The clinic's aim is to provide high‐quality dermatologic care to a diverse, underserved pediatric patient population while teaching trainees how to diagnose and manage common skin conditions. In our initial eight sessions, we served 37 patients, predominantly those with skin of color, and had a low no‐show rate of 9.8%. This report describes the general structure of the clinic, goals, and the patient population to provide an overview of our educational model for those interested in similar efforts.

Editorial: The Emerging Role of Artificial Intelligence in Dermatology

“…During the pandemic, there has also been an increased uptake of teledermatology worldwide to ensure patients and healthcare providers have access to dermatologists (44)(45)(46). Teledermatology enables patients from remote/rural areas and/or underserved populations to obtain access, while reducing wait times for dermatology referrals (47)(48)(49). Recently, ML models have been developed to assess the quality of photos submitted by patients to teledermatology consults-rejecting low quality and retaining high quality photographs (50).…”

The Use of Teledermatology in Medical Education

“…The benefits of teledermatology at the resident level are largely generalizable to medical student learning; particularly if the infrastructure for virtual dermatologic care is already in place for resident-level learning, including medical students in teledermatology consultations is an efficient and cost-effective way to provide access to greater opportunities to medical students in dermatologic learning. Guidelines for including medical students in virtual patient encounters in dermatology as outlined by Loh et al indicate that teledermatology is a feasible and cost-effective way to involve students in patient care and introduce students to the virtual delivery of care at an early stage [11,12]. In particular, teledermatology can provide medical students an early introduction to a virtual model of care and additional instruction on clinical reasoning and decision-making given the limited information of a virtual setting.…”

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic & Telehealth Implementation in a Student Run Free Clinic

“…This change evolved as an effort to continue providing care to patients, while simultaneously limiting the risk of disease transmission [10][11][12]. Successful efforts to create and offer telehealth services to uninsured or underinsured patients receiving care from SRFCs nationwide have been described [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. To date, research has focused primarily on the methods of telehealth implementation in SRFCs.…”