New curriculum empowers future healthcare providers to recognize and treat Long COVID
A new online curriculum called LEARN provides free Long COVID education for healthcare providers, working to close a gap that many medical students say exists in their training.
For the 3 doctors behind the Long COVID Education and Research Network (LEARN), peer education has always been a passion of theirs. When Anita Chopra, MD; Hector Bonilla, MD; and Linda Geng, MD, PhD, began hearing from medical students that they wanted more formal training on Long COVID, the doctors decided to work alongside students to address this critical need. Together, they created LEARN, a free, multidisciplinary curriculum for medical trainees and practicing healthcare providers.
“I hope this kind of educational material is going to have an impact on the new generation of physicians, as well as anybody [currently caring for patients] who wants to learn more [about Long COVID],” said Dr. Bonilla, one of the leaders of the project and a RECOVER researcher.
“A labor of love” across multiple institutions
LEARN grew out of a partnership between 2 universities—the University of Washington (UW) and Stanford University. Both of these universities are also RECOVER study sites and are part of a RECOVER research hub called the Pacific Northwest Consortium; however, this work was not funded by the initiative. Rather, researchers within and outside of RECOVER collaborated, applying their expertise and volunteering their time to create this resource. Dr. Chopra (University of Washington) teamed up with RECOVER researchers Dr. Bonilla and Dr. Geng (both of Stanford University) to understand and respond to the need for Long COVID physician education.
“It’s been a labor of love,” Dr. Chopra said. “The best thing about it is the inter-institutional collaboration.” In the process, she added, the 3 physicians became close friends and collaborators united by a shared cause. At UW Medicine, the Long COVID clinic where Dr. Chopra sees patients also serves as a study site for the RECOVER-ENERGIZE clinical trials.
The team spent more than a year building the curriculum as volunteers without dedicated funding, often meeting 2 or 3 times a week around their clinic and research schedules. The curriculum modules bring together expertise from multiple medical specialties—such as cardiology, infectious diseases, neurology, and rheumatology (a medical specialty focusing on rheumatic diseases including arthritis and other joint, muscle, and autoimmune conditions). This multidisciplinary approach is vital for a condition like Long COVID that can affect every system in the body, Dr. Chopra said.
The curriculum also includes contributions from researchers both within and beyond RECOVER. Discussion of several topics are led by RECOVER researchers, including Sindhu Mohandas, MD (Children’s Hospital Los Angeles; University of Southern California); Michael Peluso, MD, MHS (University of California, San Francisco); and Mitchell Miglis, MD, and William Robinson, MD, PhD (both of Stanford University School of Medicine).
Letting data drive decisions
The team began developing the curriculum after conducting a national needs assessment—a survey distributed to medical schools across the country. Most survey respondents said they had received no formal education on Long COVID.
About 1 in 3 respondents had seen or heard about the condition during clinical rotations, but nearly all reported that structured teaching about Long COVID was missing from their training. Survey participants also answered questions about content formats and their learning preferences, sharing that they wanted easily digestible lessons that they could work through at their own pace.
In response, the LEARN team created video modules that are standalone and self-paced, allowing learners to select which topics to work through. In each video, a student presents a medical case to a doctor, and they discuss the science behind the case and care options for the patient. The medical cases are anonymized and based on real cases the doctors had seen in their Long COVID clinics.
The LEARN team also relies on data to ensure that the curriculum they’ve created is meeting learners’ needs. In a pilot with 40 medical students, about 3 in 4 people who worked through the modules reported that the lessons increased both their knowledge and their confidence in managing the condition.
A patient-centered approach
For Dr. Bonilla, the work is personal. He has spent years caring for people with Long COVID and related conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), illnesses that have long been dismissed or misunderstood. He also contributes to RECOVER’s pathobiology work, conducting research to understand the root causes of the condition. Because today’s students will be tomorrow’s doctors, he sees the LEARN curriculum as one of the best ways to make sure more doctors recognize patients’ symptoms and believe their experiences.
The LEARN curriculum reflects that patient-centered goal. The program begins with the voice of a patient—cellist Joshua Roman, who lives with Long COVID—so learners hear about what it’s like to live with the condition before diving into the science.
Students help build a resource for their peers
Much of LEARN's design came from students themselves. Tom Quach, MS, an incoming medical student at Stanford, and Mehr Grewal, an undergraduate at the University of Washington, were among a team of 6 students who volunteered their time to shape the modules. Both have their own ties to Long COVID research; Grewal served as a research assistant for the UW site as it participated in the RECOVER-ENERGIZE Post-Exertional Malaise (Structured Pacing) clinical trial, and Quach worked on a Long COVID clinical trial outside of RECOVER.
Both trace their interest in Long COVID to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quach watched college classmates and their families develop COVID symptoms that lasted months, long after their initial illness. Grewal spent that time doing community outreach—for example, she helped raise awareness about the COVID vaccine once it became available. She saw how often “the scientific information wasn’t reaching the communities that needed to hear it” and learned that people's experiences with Long COVID were not being heard by scientists and doctors.
Problems like these are what Grewal and Quach hope LEARN can help solve. “People like me or like Tom, who are interested in being the next generation of healthcare professionals, can help bridge this gap because we are prepared to act on what we learn from our communities,” Grewal said.
Quach pointed to primary care as the biggest opportunity to improve Long COVID education and the way doctors care for people with Long COVID. Primary care doctors are often patients’ first stop but may know little about the condition. “Hopefully, this curriculum propels forward compassionate and well-informed care from the future generations of physicians and even the current generation of doctors,” he said.
What LEARN means for people with Long COVID
Better-prepared doctors could improve healthcare experiences for people living with Long COVID. The team designed LEARN to help healthcare providers explain the biology of Long COVID in plain language and make informed treatment decisions, so more patients feel understood and health outcomes can improve.
The team also sees room for possible expansion of the curriculum. Because Long COVID shares similarities with other infection-associated chronic conditions such as ME/CFS and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), the team hopes the curriculum can eventually help doctors recognize more of these types of conditions.
More than anything, LEARN shows what is possible when researchers, doctors, and students across the country work together toward easing suffering for millions of people. As RECOVER and other scientific efforts continue to add to the knowledge base about Long COVID, efforts like this one help ensure those discoveries reach clinicians across the country and inform their approaches to caring for patients.
Explore the LEARN curriculum.
