Quality measures of virtual care in ambulatory healthcare environments: a scoping review.

Objectives: Delivery of virtual care increased throughout the COVID-19 pandemic and persisted after physical distancing measures ended. However, little is known about how to measure the quality of virtual care, as current measures focus on in-person care and may not apply to a virtual context. This scoping review aims to understand the connections between virtual care modalities used with ambulatory patient populations and quality measures across the Quintuple Aim (provider experience, patient experience, per capita cost, population health and health equity).

Outpatient visit trends for internal medicine ambulatory care sensitive conditions after the COVID-19 pandemic: a time-series analysis.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic led to a dramatic shift in the delivery of outpatient medicine with reduced in-person visits and a transition to predominantly virtual visits. We sought to understand trends in visit patterns for ambulatory care sensitive conditions (ACSCs) commonly seen in internal medicine clinics.

Methods: We included adult outpatients seen for an ACSC between March 15th, 2017 and March 14th, 2021 at a single-centre in Ontario, Canada.

Communicating wisely: teaching residents to communicate effectively with patients and caregivers about unnecessary tests.

Background: With rising healthcare costs and a focus on quality, there is a growing need to promote resource stewardship in medical education. Physicians need to be able to communicate effectively with patients/caregivers seeking tests and treatments that are unnecessary. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of an interactive workshop on residents' knowledge of resource stewardship and communication skills when counseling patients/caregivers about requests for unnecessary testing.