Fundamentals of Telehealth: A Learning Compendium for Residents

Author

Lulu Wang, MD; Shruti Chandra, MD, MEHP; Christopher Nash, MD, EdM; Anthony Fabiano, MD, MBA; Peter Hou, MD; David Whitehead, MD; Alexander Kolkin, MD; Milos Tomovic, MD, MBA; and Emily Hayden, MD, on behalf of the SAEM Telehealth Interest Group

Toolkit Overview

Telehealth is an integral part of modern care delivery. As health systems face mounting pressures to deliver high-quality care at sustainable cost, telehealth offers the necessary tools for adaptation and evolution. While telehealth is often perceived as a stand-in service - a substitute when in-person care is unavailable or unfeasible - that would risk too narrow an understanding. Telehealth encompasses a diversity of modalities, including synchronous audio/video, remote patient monitoring, asynchronous care, and mobile health. Emergency Medicine (EM) has begun incorporating telehealth, despite the specialty's origins in in-person acute unscheduled care. As we move into the era of omnichannel communication and technology-enabled care delivery, future emergency physicians must be facile in deploying these digital health tools. However, few EM residency programs have a structured telehealth curriculum, and many trainees receive no exposure to telehealth at all.

This Fundamentals of Telehealth compendium for residents introduces basic tenets of telehealth as identified in the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) 2021 report,⁷ categorized into six domains. The collation of this educational material was led by six telehealth experts - emergency physicians from the SAEM Telehealth Interest Group - with contribution from six residents and three medical students from the SAEM Residents and Medical Students Academy.

This compendium is not comprehensive, but is intended as a scaffold upon which a residency program can build a more individualized telehealth curriculum specific to its unique telehealth service availability, patient population, practice environment, and payer mix. Supplementation can include addition of didactic materials, clinical telehealth experiences or case-based/simulation education. Alternatively, an individual can use this compendium as a self-study tool to gain a basic understanding of telehealth and its intersection with EM. Note that while the compendium is designed for the resident-level learner, it is easily adaptable to a learner of any level as many underlying concepts are the same.

Chapters

Fundamentals of Telehealth

Patient Safety and Appropriate Use of Telehealth

Telehealth Access and Equity

Communication

Data Collection and Assessment

Technology

Ethical Practices and Legal Requirements