I must admit, when I first heard about telehealth I thought that it would never replace face-to-face medicine.
But in this last year, I’ve been proven wrong. And Dr. Jay Sanders, founder of The Global Telemedicine Group, and one of the founding members of the American Telemedicine Association, probably could have convinced me in about a minute.
Writing at Healthworks Collective, Sanders said the number one benefit telehealth brings to the party is getting care to where the patient lives physically. Many of those who live in rural areas are not in close proximity to specialists or hospitals, or even doctors, in some places. But telehealth brings the doctor to them.
Using iPads, iPhones, monitoring devices and video conferencing, doctors and patients can hook up whenever and wherever they are. Try doing that with your doctor in town.
Ruth SoRelle, MPH, reported that more than 1,320 critical access hospitals provide emergency care to people who live in rural areas across the U.S. But “supplying that treatment is increasingly difficult because hospitals face increasingly slim margins and few doctors are willing to locate their practices away from the city and high technology,” she wrote. “Physicians and urban medical centers are now looking for ways to help their colleagues meet the needs of rural America.”
Telemedicine fits the bill.
Sanders cited the example of tele-cardiology, where a cardiologist or nurse can remotely see a patient at home through video-conference and also capture key vitals like heart rate and blood pressure from devices the patient has at home, cutting down on the likelihood the patient will have to be readmitted to the hospital and providing intervention, as needed, so the patient doesn’t get so ill, he must be rushed to the ER.
But how many times have you gone to the doctor for a sore throat or a back-ache, and when you get there, you feel fine? “For example, imagine you have an asthmatic patient and need to check her lungs and breathing,” Sanders wrote. “Traditionally, you can examine her at the doctor’s office. Oddly, the patient might breath fine in the relatively clean, sterile air of the doctor’s office.”
But telehealth allows the doctor to check her in her own environment, whether it is at home, work, or somewhere else. “Perhaps her home environment is full of secondhand smoke. You can get a much clearer diagnosis of the patient when you conduct it in the patient’s physical environment,” Sanders affirmed.
And what about “white coat” syndrome? I normally have low blood pressure but every time I go to the doctor, it shoots up to the sky. The same is true of other patients, like one with heart disease whose resting heart rate appears high, when he’s at the doctor’s, “and you think he has some form of tachycardia. So you work him up with all kinds of tests, and don’t find anything,” Sanders noted.
Sometimes doctors’ offices induce stress. “You would be treating him for stress created by the fact that you’re treating him!” Sanders joked. “With telehealth, you’re bringing care to patients in their normal emotional settings as well.” And getting a much more accurate read on the patient's "real-world" condition as opposed to the artificial setting of the doctor’s office or hospital.
But here’s where the technology of telemedicine really comes in. Sanders gave the example of a camera (used for a video conference) that actually enabled the doctors – psychiatrists, in this case – to control their environment in better ways than a face-to-face meeting. Some prisons are using telehealth to help inmates in just this way.
If the physician wanted to help the patient relax or to de-emphasize something that troubled the patient, “He could sit back and make the camera zoom away from himself to create the impression that the issue was less important,” Sanders wrote.
The camera has become a treatment tool.
Edited by
Rich Steeves
