A Novel Transitions of Care Elective: Value-Added Medical Education Innovations During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

During the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical care of patients and undergraduate medical education faced substantive challenges.  Many traditional patient-physician and family-physician interactions were no longer possible, and alternative, often virtual, methods of communications were required to be devised.  The existing challenges of transition of care from inpatient to outpatient treatment for many patients were exacerbated with the physical and communication restraints. The authors of this article analyzed this vital "transition of care" and identified an opportunity to improve medical student education with a special elective that addressed enhanced methods for improving the transition of care of patients within the restrictions of the pandemic.  A joint clinical faculty/medical student team developed a student elective wherein the students actively participated in its design and implementation, thus filling an identified gap in the undergraduate curriculum, which adds value to the educational effort through an innovative process in an on-going manner.  The authors describe their elective in this podcast.  The targeted audiences include medical students, resident physicians, academic faculty, clinical faculty, and institutional medical educators.