Implementing a telemedicine curriculum for internal medicine residents during a pandemic: the Cleveland Clinic experience

David J Savage,Achintya Dinesh Singh,Andrei Brateanu,Eric Yudelevich,Jamal Mahar,Catherine Fleisher,Omar Gutierrez,Stacey E Jolly,Lakshmi Khatri,Bryce Edward Montané

doi:10.1136/postgradmedj-2020-139228

Abstract

Telemedicine training was not a substantial element of most residency programmes prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing measures changed this. The Cleveland Clinic Internal Medicine Residency Programme (IMRP) is...

Highlights

OF STUDY The first documented cases of COVID-19 in Ohio occurred on 9 March 2020.1 One day later, the Cleveland Clinic’s leadership announced that all in-p erson meetings were cancelled and ambulatory patient visits would be virtual
This was a major paradigm shift for our Internal Medicine Residency Programme (IMRP), where one-third of training time is spent in ambulatory clinics
All 148 ambulatory residents in our IMRP were trained in performing virtual visits and they completed more than 2000 such visits between early April and mid-June 2020

Summary

Introduction

OF STUDY The first documented cases of COVID-19 in Ohio occurred on 9 March 2020.1 One day later, the Cleveland Clinic’s leadership announced that all in-p erson meetings were cancelled and ambulatory patient visits would be virtual. This was a major paradigm shift for our Internal Medicine Residency Programme (IMRP), where one-third of training time is spent in ambulatory clinics. A cohort of Cleveland Clinic faculty physicians have been performing virtual patient visits since 2014 using the American Well platform.[2] They conducted 41 000 virtual visits in 2019 and over 100 000 such visits by February 2020.3 Residents, had not been trained in delivering virtual care prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. The urgent need created by the pandemic called for an accelerated implementation of this nascent telemedicine curriculum

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Conclusion