There has been a sudden demand for telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has led to a corresponding need in U.S. medical education: training in healthcare technology.

Health system science is an understanding of how healthcare professionals work together as a team to deliver care. It’s also an understanding of how care is rendered and how the health system can better patient care and health care delivery. Content related to health system science has become frequent on the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE).

The National Board of Medical Examiners encompasses the topics in USMLE content online.

With the aim to help medical students, AMA Accelerating Change in Medical Education Consortium by collaborating with the “InsideTheBoards” podcast to create a series of podcasts on health system science (HSS).

Each episode of this series allows on-the-go learning.

One of the episodes featured a conversation with a physician mentor and a medical student at John Hopkins to create a virtual clinic elective. It expanded access to neurological care and covered how neurologists view their specialty.

Rachel Salas, MD, associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins Medicine said she wondered as a clerkship director, how and when they could restart. She knew that telehealth would be an essential element, though clerkship had never used it.

So, they decided to come up with this elective on a smaller scale, which was a two-week course called “Virtual Patient Rounds in Neurology”.

Kori Porosnicu Rodriguez, a fourth-year medical student, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine’s appointed peer advisor for the neurology clerkship shared that they wished to offer students away an opportunity to learn telemedicine in a virtual hands-on situation and provide neurology lecture series in a broad-based manner as clerkships were canceled in the country and worldwide.

It’s worth noting that neurology is well-suited to telemedicine.