Clinical Education in the Zoom Era

Simone P. Montoya, M.D. 

Fellow in Neuroradiology 

Massachusetts General Hospital 

PGY 7+

11/11/2020

Zoom Meeting

I am fortunate to have abundant elective time to develop skills pertinent to my future career, which is on track to be in academic radiology. This was my second time attending the Clinical Teaching Skills Course – I wanted to reinforce concepts learned my first time around, but I was also interested in how the virtual environment would be addressed.

Although the shift towards working and learning remotely was not specifically addressed, it was readily apparent in my group’s micro-teaching sessions. My group had representation from Medicine and from Surgery. I learned from the prior course that those outside Radiology don’t necessarily appreciate how the visual nature of our field actually makes it more challenging to teach to others, which is contrary to what most people expect, but we as a field have embraced virtual education. Radiology has adapted to distance learning extremely well – although there are nuances lost by not being in the same room, much of what we do is easily translatable to the virtual environment, as long as the appropriate technologic infrastructure is in place. I used the same topic as from my first time attending the course and, based on feedback from before, took advantage of screen sharing to show an example study. I feel I did better than before, not only because of my prior course experience, but also because of what I’ve picked up over the past several months.

This is in stark contrast to those in other fields of medicine, which all but necessitate in-person interactions. Being isolated in radiology, I didn’t appreciate the extent to which clinical education has been uprooted. The internist reenacted a (not so) hypothetical teaching session with a patient that would ideally be in person, but realistically would probably be done over Zoom. We discussed how the same strategies she used to prepare for our session could be used for her virtual clinic visits. The surgeon demonstrated to us an at-home hack she had devised to substitute for the OR experience that she and her colleagues were missing, and we suggested that, rather than merely adapting to the virtual environment, she actually take advantage of it to create an instructional video. For all of us, the opportunity to share our lessons with those outside our field was invaluable, but the virtual environment added an additional layer of outside perspective which I think ultimately helped us all.