[Crystal Earp]

My response will be from the perspective of a Clinical Assistant Professor in a School of Nursing Nurse Practitioner Program, with the targeted audience/learners being FNP-DNP clinical students. As a clinical assistant professor and an active family nurse practitioner (FNP) who utilizes telehealth in my clinical workplace, I see the value in bringing telehealth training into our clinical courses. I am taking this course with a colleague as our goal is to incorporate telehealth training and simulation into our clinical courses. We plan to do this with simulation using our SON Standardized Patients (SP) or potentially interacting with the theatrical department for role play and pre-set simulation cases. We initially discussed starting with the telehealth basics and how to conduct an appropriate telehealth visit and gradually expanding in complexity throughout the clinical courses, including acute/chronic care for the pediatric, young adult, and geriatric populations.
My role would be to collaborate with my colleagues as the lead facilitators. We would train our additional SON clinical course faculty and revise our courses to include telehealth training and role-play via simulation with set case scenarios. We would develop a rubric that would be used for evaluating our students to include the key components such as planning, preparing, evaluating, and delivering professional care). We would also consider pre- and post-briefs and having our students write a telehealth patient note.
Given this would take place in a clinical course and we would be using our SP or theatrical students, this would be a learning environment only. However, we would review the importance of HIPPA, having legal or verbal consent, billing regulations/restrictions, working devices, privacy, etc. We could consider having a sample patient chart that would house this information, such as consent forms and patient demographics, for the student to review.
Other professions that we could discuss include our psychiatric mental health NP students, as this program is already implementing telehealth into their course training. We could additionally expand on how telehealth can be used with various modalities, such as monitoring, and reporting results, and can be used for counseling, therapy, and consultation services, and potentially consult these departments.
Our specific protocols would be to ensure students understand the telehealth concept, when a telehealth visit is or isn’t appropriate, how to prepare for a telehealth visit, telehealth emergencies, and how to establish rapport with the patient, evaluate, give advice, and document. As this would be a new integration into our clinical courses, we also aim to do surveys to see how comfortable/confident students are with telehealth concepts and telehealth virtual visits, and then again once the education is provided, thus looking at quality improvement measures and feedback.

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