May 30, 2023
The Department of Emergency Medicine and the Center for Virtual Care (CVC) have received two grants from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC). The grants were awarded for the Department and CVC’s efforts to advance and accelerate innovation and competency-based medical education in telehealth.
One award—part of the AAMC Competency-Based Education in Telehealth Challenge Grant Program—will fund a project focusing on the use of telehealth education to address patient safety and the appropriate use of telehealth in-patient encounters. The project team, led by Dr. Kristen Ng and Dr. Neel Naik, will work on developing a distributable, simulation-based curriculum and assessment tool to help physicians determine which patient encounters are most appropriate for virtual care.
The other award—AAMC Telehealth Equity Catalyst Award—recognizes institutions with programs that leverage telehealth and healthcare technology to improve healthcare equity and whose innovative contributions to healthcare delivery can serve as models for other institutions to address and mitigate barriers to telehealth. The award will fund projects, led by Dr. Maria Lame, that will help sustain and scale curricula and programs designed to address healthcare equity and barriers to telehealth in under-resourced communities.
Commenting on the significance of the awards in advancing telehealth education, Dr. Rahul Sharma, founder and executive director of the CVC, said “The future of medicine demands that we develop and integrate competency-based inter-professional education in telehealth.” He added, “Our goal is to create a cross-specialty community of educators actively promoting telehealth in medical student, residency, and continuing education programs.”
Dr. Yoon Kang, senior associate dean for Education, noted “As healthcare professionals, we have a responsibility to equip our learners with the knowledge and skills to navigate the complexities of virtual healthcare delivery,” Dr. Kang said. “Grants like these give our faculty the opportunity to collaborate, innovate, and inspire the next generation of healthcare professionals to excel in the digital age.”
The CVC provides training on the delivery of virtual care services. Subjects taught include “web-side” manner, remote patient examination skills, modality-specific decision-making, and other essentials to conduct successful virtual care. Since its founding in 2020, the CVC has successfully trained more than 1,000 practitioners.
