Virtual Care Training: A Competency-Based Telehealth Curriculum for Physician Trainees

Area of Science:

• Medical Education
• Digital Health
• Telehealth Training

Background:

• Virtual care adoption has surged, yet standardized training remains insufficient.
• Competency-based training is crucial for effective virtual care delivery.
• Physician trainees require structured education in telehealth practices.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a feasible, interactive virtual care training (VCT) curriculum for physicians.
• To align VCT with national competency standards, such as those from the AAMC.
• To assess the impact of VCT on trainee confidence and objective performance in telehealth tasks.

Main Methods:

• A quasi-experimental, pre-post design was used to evaluate a 3-hour VCT program.
• The curriculum included didactic sessions, case-based activities, and Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) with standardized patients.
• Trainee self-reported outcomes (comfort, difficulty, likelihood to recommend) and OSCE performance were assessed.

Main Results:

• 126 trainees participated; 64% had no prior virtual care experience.
• Post-training, significant improvements were observed in comfort levels for virtual visits (94.4%), virtual physical exams (78.5%), and medication reconciliation (96.0%).
• Perceived difficulty decreased significantly, and likelihood to recommend virtual care increased (88.0% vs 50.4%).

Conclusions:

• The structured 3-hour VCT program is a feasible model for enhancing telehealth skills.
• The curriculum demonstrably improves trainee confidence and performance in virtual care tasks.
• This VCT model provides a scalable approach for integrating telehealth training into graduate medical education.