Orientation weeks help incoming residents overcome some of the difficulties that resident programs believe exist. Post COVID-19, there has been a mass shift in virtual visits yet no formal curriculum exists for this technical shift. In our project, we focused on neurological exams and wanted to assess if there is a benefit in introducing a curriculum for it.

Virtual medicine is here to stay and so we must incorporate a virtual curriculum into our medical education curriculum. Our pilot study results indicate a need for this in Neurology, and we believe the results could be generalized to other medical specialties. 

We took ten medical students and randomly assigned them into two groups. Group A consisted of naïvestudents who initially had no formal virtual curriculum. After their initial encounter with Standardized Patient (SP), Group A and Group B students received the same curriculum.  Both Groups had 1 hour block time to perform their encounter with SP’s. All the encounters were recorded for review later on by neurologist and students were graded on their exams. 

80% of the students scored inadequate or poor on their neurological exam assessment scores. After going through the curriculum material, all students achieved at least a good score in Group A except one who scored fair. Additionally, one student scored very good on their assessments. Group B had 60% of students score in the very good range, with one student scoring Poor and the other scoring inadequate.