Teaching Telemedicine: The Next Frontier for Medical Educators (Preprint)

Abstract

UNSTRUCTURED The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed telemedicine to the forefront of healthcare delivery, and for many clinicians, virtual visits are the new normal. While telemedicine allowed clinicians to safely care for patients from a distance during the pandemic, rapid adoption has outpaced clinician training and development of best practices. Additionally, telemedicine has pulled trainees into a new virtual education environment that finds them oftentimes physically separated from their preceptors. Medical educators are challenged with figuring out how to integrate learners into virtual workflows while teaching and providing patient-centered virtual care. In this viewpoint, we review principles of patient-centered care in the in-person setting, explore the concept of patient-centered virtual care, and advocate for development and implementation of patient-centered telemedicine competencies. We will then recommend strategies for teaching patient-centered virtual care, integrating trainees into virtual workflows, and developing telemedicine curricula for graduate medical education trainees using our TELEMEDS framework as a model.