JMIR Medical Education

We feel that the current COVID-19 crisis has created great uncertainty and anxiety among medical students. With medical school classes initially being conducted on the web and the approaching season of “the Match” (a uniform system by which residency candidates and residency programs in the United States simultaneously “match” with the aid of a computer algorithm to fill first-year and second-year postgraduate training positions accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education), the situation did not seem to be improving. The National Resident Matching Program made an official announcement on May 26, 2020, that candidates would not be required to take or pass the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 2 Clinical Skills (CS) examination to participate in the Match. On January 26, 2021, formal discontinuation of Step 2 CS was announced; for this reason, we have provided our perspective of possible alternative solutions to the Step 2 CS examination. A successful alternative model can be implemented in future residency match seasons as well.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed telemedicine to the forefront of health care delivery, and for many clinicians, virtual visits are the new normal. Although telemedicine has allowed clinicians to safely care for patients from a distance during the current pandemic, its rapid adoption has outpaced clinician training and development of best practices. Additionally, telemedicine has pulled trainees into a new virtual education environment that finds them oftentimes physically separated from their preceptors. Medical educators are challenged with figuring out how to integrate learners into virtual workflows while teaching and providing patient-centered virtual care. In this viewpoint, we review principles of patient-centered care in the in-person setting, explore the concept of patient-centered virtual care, and advocate for the development and implementation of patient-centered telemedicine competencies. We also recommend strategies for teaching patient-centered virtual care, integrating trainees into virtual workflows, and developing telemedicine curricula for graduate medical education trainees by using our TELEMEDS framework as a model.

Kahoot! is a web-based technology quiz game in which teachers can design their own quizzes via provided game templates. The advantages of these games are their attractive interfaces, which contain stimulating music, moving pictures, and colorful, animated shapes to maintain students’ attentiveness while they perform the quizzes.

Telehealth has become an increasingly important part of health care delivery, with a dramatic rise in telehealth visits during the COVID-19 pandemic. Telehealth visits will continue to be a part of care delivery after the pandemic subsides, and it is important that medical students receive training in telehealth skills to meet emerging telehealth competencies. This paper describes strategies for successfully integrating medical students into telehealth visits in the ambulatory setting based on existing literature and the extensive experience of the authors teaching and learning in the telehealth environment.

Medical students enter the medicine field with fresh ideas that may make them great entrepreneurs. However, medical students are uncertain about how the program directors of their desired residency would view them if they pursued business opportunities. We surveyed residency directors to obtain their views on medical students’ entrepreneurship experiences. This viewpoint article aims to help American medical students who are interested in health innovations understand how their interests and entrepreneurial experiences may affect how they are viewed by residency program directors. Most program directors had favorable views of medical students with experience in entrepreneurship, and they believed that the innovative traits gained from such experiences would add to the program.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought virtual web-based learning to the forefront of medical education as training programs adapt to physical distancing challenges while maintaining the rigorous standards of medical training. Social media has unique and partially untapped potential to supplement formal medical education.

Existing research on the costs associated with the design and deployment of eLearning in health professions education is limited. The relative costs of these learning platforms to those of face-to-face learning are also not well understood. The lack of predefined costing models used for eLearning cost data capture has made it difficult to complete cost evaluation.

Accurate data retrieval is an essential part of patient care in the intensive care unit (ICU). The electronic health record (EHR) is the primary method for data storage and data review. We previously reported that residents participating in EHR-based simulations have varied and nonstandard approaches to finding data in the ICU, with subsequent errors in recognizing patient safety issues. We hypothesized that a novel EHR simulation-based training exercise would decrease EHR use variability among intervention interns, irrespective of prior EHR experience.

The adoption rate of digital health in the health care sector is low in many countries. A facilitating factor for successful implementation and adoption of digital health is acceptance by current and future health care professionals.

Simulation-based training is a common strategy for improving the quality of facility-based maternity services and is often evaluated using Kirkpatrick’s theoretical model. The results on the Kirkpatrick levels are closely related to the quality of the instructional design of a training program. The instructional design is generally defined as the “set of prescriptions for teaching methods to improve the quality of instruction with a goal of optimizing learning outcomes.”

Mobile learning has become an essential instruction platform in many schools, colleges, universities, and various other educational institutions across the globe, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The resulting severe, pandemic-related circumstances have disrupted physical and face-to-face contact teaching practices, thereby requiring many students to actively use mobile technologies for learning. Mobile learning technologies offer viable web-based teaching and learning platforms that are accessible to teachers and learners worldwide.

The collaborative clinical simulation (CCS) model is a structured method for the development and assessment of clinical competencies through small groups working collaboratively in simulated environments. From 2016 onward, the CCS model has been applied successfully among undergraduate and graduate medical students from the Universidad de Talca, Chile; the Universität de Barcelona, Spain; and the Universidad de Vic-Manresa, Spain. All the templates for building the clinical cases and the assessment instruments with CCS were printed on paper. Considering the large number of CCS sessions and the number of participating students that are required throughout the medical degree curriculum, it is impossible to keep an organized record when the instruments are printed on paper. Moreover, with the COVID-19 pandemic, web platforms have become important as safe training environments for students and medical faculties; this new educational environment should include the consolidation and adaptation of didactic sessions that create and use available virtual cases and use different web platforms.