An Innovative Use of Telepresence Robots for Educating Healthcare Professional

Telehealth enhances communication across distances, facilitates teamwork, and increases access to care, particularly in rural areas. As the use of telehealth technology assimilates into clinical practice, its integration is also needed in clinical curricula. Students participated in 2 pediatric scenarios in teams of 3 to 4 prelicensure nursing students, with one nurse practitioner student participating via a telepresence robot. Forty-eight prelicensure and 5 nurse practitioner students completed surveys following the clinical simulations. We found that it was feasible to use a telepresence robot as a tool in clinical simulation, to introduce telehealth, and students reported high mean scores on the acceptability of using the robot. While there are challenges, incorporating telepresence technology into simulations opens up many opportunities to both engage students in telehealth with patients and other clinicians, and to engage students in their education when they are learning at a distance.