Converting for COVID: 

The Problem:
The COVID-19 pandemic forced medical students from their core Emergency Medicine rotation in March 2020. An urgent need for virtual medical education emerged due to the uncertainty of when and how medical trainees could return to clinical environments. 

The Gap:
While Emergency Medicine has a plethora of online resources - namely Free Open Access Medical Education content such as blogs, podcasts and videos - these resources do not have dynamic faculty / resident / learner engagement and often do not target junior learners. Furthermore, these resources are largely seen as a supplement to clinical experiences. During covid, virtual curricula replaced in person exposures. Virtual case based learning has no risk to patients or providers, is stress free for faculty and allows for repeated exposure and emphasis on key learning points. 

The Innovation:
We developed clinical cases based on sentinel ED presentations. These cases were released in an episodic manner three days a week on Slack for students (n=23) and moderators (faculty (n=6) and residents(n=5) to participate in an asynchronous manner. The prompting questions guided students through clinical decision making from assessing the patient, ordering tests and starting treatments. Asynchronous participation was chosen as the clinicians still had active duties limiting faculty resources. 

Why Others Should Try This:
Student and faculty engagement was high with a total of 2,548 messages sent during the online sessions were written by students (45%), faculty members (27%), clerkship administrators (20%), and residents (8%). A total of 62,237 words were written by the participants, with a mean of 1,831 words per person, while each message consisted of a mean (±SD) of 25 (±29) words. We compared participants' Slack familiarity before (mean ± SD = 2.41 ± 1.84) and after (mean ± SD = 5.00 ± 1.07) the intervention and found significant increase in their familiarity with Slack (t(28)=8.74, p < 0.001) with a large effect of Cohen’s d = 1.62. This innovation is easy to deploy, scales rapidly, requires little prior technical knowledge and engages faculty and students without impacting their clinical responsibilities.