Enhancing Telehealth Practice: Promoting Competency Through an Evidenced Curriculum

Background: Despite the rapid expansion of telehealth, there remains a paucity of available resources to ensure competency of healthcare providers. The lack of training programs for medical, allied health, and nursing students may limit the quality of telehealth services that they deliver in the future. Following the recommendations of Hollander et al. (2018), we created and tested an interprofessional telehealth education curriculum consisting of five didactic modules and three experiential learning session with community health mentors. The objective of this program evaluation is to describe the efficacy of an experiential curriculum on telehealth competency attainment (i.e., knowledge, skills, and attitudes) provided to students in medicine (N = 150), allied health (n=135), and nursing (n=191).

Methods: Data on students’ self-reported competency in using telehealth to provide services was collected at three time points: baseline, post-didactic modules, and post-experiential learning sessions. We used a repeated measures ANOVA to examine the influence of program on self-reported competency attainment.

Results: Student participants demonstrated significant improvements in areas of telehealth competency following the curriculum, as none reported previous training in telehealth. There was a statistically significant effect of the curriculum on student self-reported competency attainment, F(1,424)=271.759, p<.001 as well as a significant influence of academic program on competency attainment F(2,424)=10.419, p<.001. Specifically, nursing and allied health students reported different baseline levels of competence (p <.05, respectively), there was a lack of difference between students’ post-didactic modules, and a statistically significant difference between allied health and medical students at the final time point (p <.05). See Table 1.

Conclusion: Findings support the use of both didactic and experiential components of an interprofessional curricula to enhance practice competency among medicine, allied health, and nursing students. Results suggest that medical students reported the highest baseline competency and allied health students reported the most growth in competency attainment. Regardless of academic program, students made significant gains in competency attainment due to both didactic modules as well as additional significant gains due to three experiential learning sessions with a community health mentor. Competency for provision of quality telehealth services may be enhanced through an experiential curriculum.