News

GNYHA’s Telehealth Learning Series Focuses on Academic Medicine

February 22, 2021

GNYHA recently hosted Telehealth in Academic Medicine, Part 1, the second program in a multipart series on telehealth that also provided a faculty development opportunity for those in graduate medical education (GME) leadership positions. Featured speakers were Kimberly Noel, MD, Stony Brook Medicine Telehealth Director and Deputy Chief Medical Information Officer; William Wertheim, MD, Interim Dean, Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University; and Kathleen Scarbrough, MD, a third year resident at Stony Brook Medicine.

Dr. Noel reviewed Stony Brook Medicine’s efforts to implement telehealth education into GME. Her presentation urged “everyone incorporating telehealth to think outside the box of not only the workflow, but about the values and ethics that drive what we do in medicine.”

The seed of the telehealth effort at Stony Brook was its Tele-Preventive Medicine Service, a grant-funded initiative to train residents on how to address gaps in care using video visits.

“This was incredibly important,” Dr. Noel said, noting that the service’s workflows and technologies were scaled across the system following the onset of the pandemic. “We created the infrastructure we now use to treat hundreds of patients.”

Dr. Wertheim discussed efforts by the Accreditation Council for GME related to telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. He noted that one challenge facing residents using telehealth as a learning environment is knowing when to transition to an in-person visit. He also discussed ways to structure supervision in telehealth.

Dr. Scarbrough provided the trainee perspective and discussed her introduction to telehealth, which preceded the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We were going to offer a way for family medicine providers have us help them help their patients get the preventive services they needed. Then COVID hit, and everything was up and running at once.”

Telehealth in Academic Medicine, Part 2. will take place on February 24. Please register here.