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Spring 2020 Newsletter: Oral Medicine at University of California San Francisco

Alessandro Villa, DDS, MPH, PHD

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, oral medicine urgent care for patients has continued with appropriate clinic coverage at UCSF. Distance Education technology is being utilized in the clinic portion of the program. Our residents gain clinical experience by providing care for our patients via telemedicine visits through the UCSF Telehealth system (hosted through Zoom) which is a secure and HIPAA-compliant platform to deliver virtual medical and dental care. Tele (oral) medicine visits are conducted under the supervision of the attending oral medicine faculty member and utilized to monitor resident diagnosis and treatment planning and provide patient care. Both new consultations and follow up patients are scheduled on a daily basis. In addition, all didactic teaching and instruction were moved to zoom video chat. Two additional clinic-pathological conference (CPC) weekly sessions were added to the oral medicine curriculum. The CPC is a series of case-based presentations prepared by faculty and residents using clinical cases. These cases are selected to highlight not only unusual, challenging and difficult cases, but also common cases with unusual presentation.