A virtual teaching clinic for virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted the rapid transition of in-person outpatient care to telemedicine, and clinical training to remote learning. The endocrinology fellows at the University of Michigan maintain their own continuity-of-care clinics and rotate in the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs (VA) Healthcare System. For these clinics, we sought to preserve patient staffing with expert attending physicians and continue the clinical training experience in a remote setting.We have adapted the online conferencing platform, Zoom, to integrate learners into a virtual teaching clinic environment. By using the Zoom “breakout room” feature, fellows are able to match staffing attending physicians to different patient cases, according to attending physicians’ areas of specialty. Similar to the traditional teaching clinic environment, our remote staffing strategy has ensured that fellows continue to provide excellent patient care and fulfill educational aims across our University and VA facilities.Outpatient clinics in other University of Michigan departments and other academic centers have inquired about or have begun utilizing our method. Even beyond COVID-19, our paradigm potentially provides a convenient virtual staffing platform to serve patient populations with geographic or transportation challenges. Following implementation, stakeholders can regularly evaluate the approach to continually improve both patient care and medical education.

L’ambulatorio di Endocrinologia durante e dopo la pandemia da COVID-19: opinioni e riflessioni

“…Un modello di televisita, destinato anche agli studenti e ai medici in formazione specialistica e utilizzabile anche per discussioni cliniche multidisciplinari, è delineato compiutamente in un lavoro apparso nelle prime settimane di pandemia con prospettive di applicazione a pandemia attenuata e, sperabilmente, esaurita [ 4 ]. Gli autori hanno adattato la nota piattaforma Zoom alle esigenze cliniche e formative, coinvolgendo un medico, altre figure professionali (infermieri), una sala d’attesa virtuale ospitante studenti o specializzandi e/o il gruppo multidisciplinare di specialisti, secondo una procedura già prefigurata nel 2018 nel Regno Unito dal Royal College of Physicians nel documento Outpatient: the future [ 28 ].…”

A new option for education during surgical procedures and related clinical anatomy in a virtual reality workspace

“…The COVID‐19 pandemic and mandatory social distancing has brought challenges to anatomy educators and other teachers who generally need in‐person classes. After numerous efforts by educators, online classes using live communication tools, for example, Zoom (He, Shelden, Kraftson, Else, & Auchus, 2020; Rucker, Steele, Zumwalt, & Bray, 2020), Skype (Petrovski, Campbell, Almajali, Al Khalaf, & Hussain, 2020), and Microsoft Teams (Henderson et al, 2020; Higgins, Murphy, & Hogg, 2020), have proved useful alternative methods for education. One of the advantages of live communication tools over in‐person classes is that they enable lecturers to provide presentations even if the participants are located in different cities, states, or even countries (Iwanaga, Tanaka, Ohyama, & Tubbs, 2020).…”

“…The COVID-19 pandemic and mandatory social distancing has brought challenges to anatomy educators and other teachers who generally need in-person classes. After numerous efforts by educators, online classes using live communication tools, for example, Zoom (He, Shelden, Kraftson, Else, & Auchus, 2020;Rucker, Steele, Zumwalt, & Bray, 2020), Skype (Petrovski, Campbell, Almajali, Al Khalaf, & Hussain, 2020), and Microsoft Teams (Henderson et al, 2020;Higgins, Murphy, & Hogg, 2020), have proved useful alternative methods for education.…”

“A Head Start or a Pain in the Neck?”—Establishment and Evaluation of a Video-Based “Hands-On” Head and Neck Ultrasound Course

“…At medical schools, numerous courses such as internships, hands-on training sessions, and medical clerkships could not be continued during the pandemic situation. New online-based concepts using video conferencing systems [1] and virtual classrooms [2] had to be established to keep up with existing courses and build new content from the ground up.…”