Development of a communication-based virtual patient counseling objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) for first year student pharmacists

OBJECTIVE: This text seeks to describe a framework for delivering and executing a virtual patient counseling OSCE and compare student performance to the in-person alternative. METHODS: A communication-based virtual patient counseling objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) was created to fulfill the educational outcomes of a previously held in-person OSCE in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual nature of this OSCE simulated a telehealth encounter, which has increased in utilization since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This OSCE was offered twice in one semester – once as a formative assessment and once as a summative assessment. Student performance was mapped to learning outcomes and compared the previous year's in person performance. RESULTS: The described virtual framework for executing the OSCE successfully decreased the time required and saw <1% change in overall performance from students when compared to the previous year in person which was not statistically significant. CONCLUSION: This framework for a virtual communication-based OSCE reduces time with a negligible impact on student performance compared to the in person alternative. INNOVATION: This work describes a telehealth virtual patient counseling model to replace the traditional patient counseling OSCE in pharmacy education with comparable outcomes.