Direct to Patient Synchronous Teledermatology During COVID-19 Pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, teledermatology became a popular mode of health care delivery. Thus, deciphering which diagnoses are best suited for synchronous video visits is important to guide providers on appropriate patient care. We conducted a retrospective study of 1,647 submitted synchronous video visits from September 1, 2020 to March 31, 2021 at a single, large academic institution.

Dermoscopy can be safely and reliably used in ophthalmology.

Objective: To determine if dermoscopy, a technique widely utilized in dermatology for improved diagnosis of skin lesions, can be used comfortably for evaluating periorbital, eyelid, and conjunctival lesions.

Design: Proof-of-concept study in which a technique for performing dermoscopy near the eye was developed, related educational material was prepared, and a protocol for dermoscopic image capture was created.

Methods: Technicians used the developed materials to learn to take high-quality pictures with a 10x dermoscope attached to a standard cell phone camera.

Potential Use of ChatGPT in Responding to Patient Questions and Creating Patient Resources.

ChatGPT (OpenAI) is an artificial intelligence-based free natural language processing model that generates complex responses to user-generated prompts. The advent of this tool comes at a time when physician burnout is at an all-time high, which is attributed at least in part to time spent outside of the patient encounter within the electronic medical record (documenting the encounter, responding to patient messages, etc). Although ChatGPT is not specifically designed to provide medical information, it can generate preliminary responses to patients' questions about their medical conditions and can precipitately create educational patient resources, which do inevitably require rigorous editing and fact-checking on the part of the health care provider to ensure accuracy.