Assessing Telemedicine Competencies: Developing and Validating Learner Measures for Simulation-Based Telemedicine Training.

In 2021, the Association of American Medical Colleges published Telehealth Competencies Across the Learning Continuum, a roadmap for designing telemedicine curricula and evaluating learners. While this document advances educators' shared understanding of telemedicine's core content and performance expectations, it does not include turn-key-ready evaluation instruments. At the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine, we developed a year-long telemedicine curriculum for third-year medical and second-year physician assistant students. We used the AAMC framework to create program objectives and instructional simulations. We designed and piloted an assessment rubric for eight AAMC competencies to accompany the simulations. In this monograph, we describe the rubric development, scores for students participating in simulations, and results comparing inter-rater reliability between faculty and standardized patient evaluators. Our preliminary work suggests that our rubric provides a practical method for evaluating learners by faculty during telemedicine simulations. We also identified opportunities for additional reliability and validity testing.

Pelvic Floor Dysfunction in the Female Athlete.

Pelvic floor dysfunction (PFD) is a term used to describe a variety of disorders involving moderate to severe impairment of the pelvic floor muscles. It can be divided into two broad categories. Relaxing PFD is more common, presenting with urinary incontinence, fecal incontinence, or pelvic organ prolapse. Nonrelaxing PFD symptoms include impaired ability to evacuate urine or stool, sexual dysfunction, and pelvic pain. Unfamiliarity with this diagnosis among medical providers along with nonspecific symptoms often lead to a delayed or missed diagnosis for patients. Here, we present the case of a collegiate soccer player with PFD to illustrate the severity of presentation and progression of this disorder. We review the current literature regarding nonrelaxing PFD and all types of PFD in female athletes to raise awareness and recognition of this condition.