T he field of telemedicine, in which clinicians use remote evaluation and monitoring to diagnose and treat patients, has grown substantially over the past decade. Its roles in acute care medicine settings are diverse, including virtual intensive care unit (ICU) care, afterhours medical admissions, cross coverage, and, most aptly, disaster management. 1 At HealthPartners, a large integrated healthcare delivery and financing system based in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, we have used provider-initiated telemedicine in hospital medicine for more than 2 years, providing evening and nighttime hospitalist coverage to our rural hospitals. We additionally provide a 24/7 nurse practitioner-staffed virtual clinic called Virtuwell. 2 Because we are now immersed in a global pandemic, we have taken steps to bolster our telemedicine infrastructure to meet increasing needs.SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, is a novel coronavirus with the capability to cause severe illness in roughly 14% of those infected. 3 According to some estimates, the virus may infect up to 60% of the US population in the next year. 4 As the pandemic looms over the country and the healthcare community, telemedicine can offer tools to help respond to this crisis. Healthcare systems leveraging telemedicine for patient care will gain several advantages, including workforce sustainability, reduction of provider burnout, limitation of provider exposure, and reduction of personal protective equipment (PPE) waste (Table ). Telemedicine can also facilitate staffing of both large and small facilities that find themselves overwhelmed with pandemic-related patient overload (PRPO). Although telemedicine holds promise for pandemic response, this technology has limitations. It requires robust IT infrastructure, training of both nurses and physicians, and modifications to integrate within hospital workflows. In this article, we summarize key clinical needs that telemedicine can meet, implementation challenges, and important business considerations.

Telemedicine acute care may address issues facing critical access hospitals. This evaluation used web, mail, and telephone surveys to quantitatively and qualitatively assess patient and care team experience with telemedicine in 3 rural critical access hospitals and a large metropolitan tertiary care hospital. Results show that patients, nurses, and clinicians perceived quality of care as high, and they offered feasible recommendations to enhance communication and otherwise improve the experience. Continued work to improve, test, and publish findings on patient and care team experience with telemedicine is critical to providing quality services in often underserved communities.

Evidence is sparse when it comes to the longitudinal impact of educational interventions on empathy among clinicians. Additionally, most available research on empathy is on medical trainee cohorts. We set out to study the impact of empathy and communication training on practicing clinicians’ self-reported empathy and whether it can be sustained over six months. An immersive curriculum was designed to teach empathy and communication skills, which entailed experiential learning with simulated encounters and didactics on the foundational elements of communication. Self-reported Jefferson Scale of Empathy (JSE) was scored before and at two points (1–4 weeks and 6 months) after the training. Overall, clinicians’ mean self-empathy scores increased following the workshop and were sustained at six months. Specifically, the perspective taking domain of the empathy scale, which relates to cognitive empathy, showed the most responsiveness to educational interventions. Our analysis shows that a structured and immersive training curriculum centered on building communication and empathy skills has the potential to positively impact clinician empathy and sustain self-reported empathy scores among practicing clinicians.