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Providing support in a pandemic: A medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with COVID-19
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when health systems were overwhelmed with surging hospitalizations and a novel virus, many ambulatory patients diagnosed with COVID-19 lacked guidance and support as they convalesced at home. This case report offers insight into the implementation of...
Autores principales: | , , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Elsevier Inc.
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8758284/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35063893 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hjdsi.2022.100612 |
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author | Zhang, Annie GoodSmith, Matthew Server, Steven Uddin, Sophia McNulty, Moira Sherer, Renslow Lio, Jonathan |
author_facet | Zhang, Annie GoodSmith, Matthew Server, Steven Uddin, Sophia McNulty, Moira Sherer, Renslow Lio, Jonathan |
author_sort | Zhang, Annie |
collection | PubMed |
description | During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when health systems were overwhelmed with surging hospitalizations and a novel virus, many ambulatory patients diagnosed with COVID-19 lacked guidance and support as they convalesced at home. This case report offers insight into the implementation of a telehealth service utilizing third- and fourth-year medical students to provide follow-up to ambulatory patients diagnosed with COVID-19. The service was evaluated using medical student surveys and retrospective chart review to assess the clinical and social needs of patients during the spring of 2020. Students assessed symptoms for 416 patients with COVID-19 from April 8 to May 20 and provided clinical information and resources. Eighteen percent of these patients sought higher levels of medical care, in part from student referrals. Three key implementation lessons from this experience that may be relevant for others include: 1) Vulnerable patient populations face unique stressors exacerbated by the pandemic and may benefit from intensive follow-up after COVID-19 diagnosis to address both medical and social needs; 2) Medical students can play value-added roles in providing patient education to prevent the spread of COVID-19, assisting patients with escalating care or resource connection, and providing emotional support to those who have lost loved ones; 3) Continuous re-assessment of the intervention was important to address evolving patient needs during the COVID-19 outbreak. Future work should focus on identifying high-risk patient populations and tailoring follow-up interventions to meet the unique needs of these patient populations. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8758284 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Elsevier Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-87582842022-01-14 Providing support in a pandemic: A medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with COVID-19 Zhang, Annie GoodSmith, Matthew Server, Steven Uddin, Sophia McNulty, Moira Sherer, Renslow Lio, Jonathan Healthc (Amst) Article During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when health systems were overwhelmed with surging hospitalizations and a novel virus, many ambulatory patients diagnosed with COVID-19 lacked guidance and support as they convalesced at home. This case report offers insight into the implementation of a telehealth service utilizing third- and fourth-year medical students to provide follow-up to ambulatory patients diagnosed with COVID-19. The service was evaluated using medical student surveys and retrospective chart review to assess the clinical and social needs of patients during the spring of 2020. Students assessed symptoms for 416 patients with COVID-19 from April 8 to May 20 and provided clinical information and resources. Eighteen percent of these patients sought higher levels of medical care, in part from student referrals. Three key implementation lessons from this experience that may be relevant for others include: 1) Vulnerable patient populations face unique stressors exacerbated by the pandemic and may benefit from intensive follow-up after COVID-19 diagnosis to address both medical and social needs; 2) Medical students can play value-added roles in providing patient education to prevent the spread of COVID-19, assisting patients with escalating care or resource connection, and providing emotional support to those who have lost loved ones; 3) Continuous re-assessment of the intervention was important to address evolving patient needs during the COVID-19 outbreak. Future work should focus on identifying high-risk patient populations and tailoring follow-up interventions to meet the unique needs of these patient populations. Elsevier Inc. 2022-03 2022-01-14 /pmc/articles/PMC8758284/ /pubmed/35063893 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hjdsi.2022.100612 Text en © 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active. |
spellingShingle | Article Zhang, Annie GoodSmith, Matthew Server, Steven Uddin, Sophia McNulty, Moira Sherer, Renslow Lio, Jonathan Providing support in a pandemic: A medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with COVID-19 |
title | Providing support in a pandemic: A medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with COVID-19 |
title_full | Providing support in a pandemic: A medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with COVID-19 |
title_fullStr | Providing support in a pandemic: A medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with COVID-19 |
title_full_unstemmed | Providing support in a pandemic: A medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with COVID-19 |
title_short | Providing support in a pandemic: A medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with COVID-19 |
title_sort | providing support in a pandemic: a medical student telehealth service for ambulatory patients with covid-19 |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8758284/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35063893 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.hjdsi.2022.100612 |
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