COVID-19 Response: Filling Emerging Gaps

March 9, 2020

Colleagues,

As the COVID-19 outbreak expands, student access to patient care is being restricted with unprecedented scope. The uncertainty of this evolving situation is impacting student opportunities to learn and heightening concerns about the vulnerability and quality of student education. Aquifer is committed to helping you meet this challenge, and to support you as you stretch to care for both your students and for your community’s patient population. To do our part during this difficult time, Aquifer is offering access to 146 cases and WISE-MD to our subscribing schools at no additional charge through June 30, 2020.

Rising to Meet Your Emerging Online Learning Needs

Aquifer’s virtual patient cases about core clinical conditions, developed by your colleagues to meet your national educational objectives, are—by design—available to fill the gaps you are experiencing in your student’s clinical training. We want you to be able to take full advantage of your Aquifer cases during this outbreak to help supplement clinical experiences that your students may be lacking due to access restrictions. Whether your students are impacted in the pre-clerkship phase and unable to attend preceptorships, or in the clinical phase and restricted from the inpatient units, clinics, operating or radiology reading rooms, we are here for you.

If you need more content than is currently available in your subscription in order to temporarily support impacted learners, we are taking the unprecedented step of providing free access to 146 Aquifer signature cases and WISE-MD through June 30, 2020, to all current Aquifer institutional subscribers. This includes:

Additional course access will be provided by request only and will require completion of a short application available starting on Thursday, March 12th at aquifer.org/covid19. The purpose of the application is to provide us with some additional details required to meet the needs at your school. The application must be completed by the single point of contact for your program’s Aquifer subscription, *|PSA|*.

Leveraging Trusted Tools

Remember, Aquifer’s searchable case library can help you search across all available cases by diagnosis, presenting problem, system, and more to find the cases you need to fill your emerging gaps. Our custom course feature is available to then help you build courses and assign cases to individual students or groups.

As medical educators ourselves, we understand the challenges you are facing are extraordinary and we here to support you and your students. We hope that these additional resources will alleviate some of the difficulties your students may face. We will be sending an update when the application for additional content is available. In the meantime, please visit aquifer.org/covid19 for additional details, updates, and training on using the learning tools and content available with your subscription.

Sincerely,

Sherilyn Smith, MD
Aquifer Chief Academic Officer
Professor of Pediatrics and Infectious Disease
University of Washington School of Medicine

Leslie Fall, MD
Aquifer Executive Director & Chief Executive Officer

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