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Motivation: Telehealth, virtual care platforms to connect healthcare providers and patients by phone or video chat, has emerged to transform healthcare delivery in the past decade by providing an alternative to in-person office visits. The current COVID-19 crisis suddenly makes it the new norm for non-emergent patients and “an indispensable tool” to help “flatten the curve of infections” (Dr. Lee Schwamm, Harvard Health Blog, March 24, 2020). Not only does telehealth help free up medical staff and equipment needed for those seriously ill from COVID-19, it also keeps people from congregating in small spaces like waiting rooms and keeps healthcare providers from patients and providers as “medical distancing”. However, most healthcare providers have very limited training on how to effectively engage patients and adapt to this new way of providing healthcare services without a hands-on physical exam.
Solution: We developed a Virtual Visit Simulation (V-Visit Sim) App that replicates a virtual visit encounter between a healthcare provider and a patient. The purpose is to train healthcare providers through simulated telehealth cases (encounters) in which healthcare providers and patient/caregivers interact with each other through a chat-message format. It can be expanded to video chat via standardized patients (i.e., sample patients or simulated patients). A chat-bot engine in the backend will respond to relevant questions or “I am not sure”/”I don’t know” to irrelevant questions. The goal is for providers to collect appropriate information from the history and virtual physical exam (chat messages, images, and video) and develop a correct diagnosis and management plan.