As technology continues to transform the delivery of healthcare, it is expected that medical schools will help future physicians embrace the use of virtual care and telehealth during their education.
In order to help medical students become more familiar with using video-based communication platforms, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted policy at its 2016 Annual Meeting to ensure medical students and residents learn how to use telehealth in clinical practice. The new policy recommends that accrediting bodies for undergraduate and graduate medical education include programming which supports core competencies for telehealth. The new policy also reaffirms existing AMA policy, which supports reducing barriers to incorporating the appropriate use of telehealth into the education of physicians.
In a June 2016 press release, AMA Immediate Past President Robert M. Wah, M.D. noted that “as innovation in care delivery and technology continue to transform healthcare, we must ensure that our current and future physicians have the tools and resources they need to provide the best possible care for their patients… In particular, exposure to and evidence-based instruction in telemedicine’s capabilities and limitations at all levels of physician education will be essential to harnessing its potential.”
A report in the Journal of Medical Internet Research conveys that medical students must be able to determine when telehealth is appropriate and how to best process information during virtual visits. The report suggests that training can be addressed during preclinical years as well as during rotations. For example, medical students could complete a number of hours on “digital call” in order to provide them with experience in using virtual care solutions under faculty supervision.
Bedside and webside manners are now recognized as core skills for today’s and tomorrow’s physicians. Whether conducting an appointment in-person or via video, future physicians’ objective of delivering optimized healthcare remains constant. Easy to use video technology will help physicians maintain an empathetic and compassionate rapport with patients during virtual visits.
Abraham Verghese, M.D., senior associate chair of the Stanford University School of Medicine, recently closed out the 25th annual meeting of the American Hospital Association Leadership Summit in San Diego. In his remarks about the use of technology in medicine, he stated “I do think there’s a danger that we can lose sight of the patient, and technology becomes technology for its own sake… innovation in health care is going to come from informatics, from scaling up technology, but it has to come from the sort of progress we saw from the mainframe computers to our iPhone. Frankly, we aren’t seeing that kind of evolution in the delivery of care,” Verghese said.