Opinion: Today’s Telemedicine
It’s anything but convenient… and it will save your life!
Most of you have seen the ads about the convenience of seeing your doctor from your home or office. No need to spend half the day in a waiting room when telemedicine makes it all too easy to be seen from the comfort of, well, wherever you can use your mobile device.
The digital format is modern, the video quality is high definition, and best of all there’s no copay or wait time. Despite the absent physical exam, the questions remain focused, the antibiotic is prescribed, and the patient is happy. It would seem that telemedicine is all about convenience!
And if this ensures an evaluation (albeit limited in scope) it is accepted and even promoted considering patient access and ease of care.
The truth is, todays office evaluation is also limited in scope. The metrics taken are static figures; they give no sense as to what happens in a 24-hour cycle. Almost always, the patient’s reported symptoms are not present at the time of the visit. And unless the patient was already instructed to keep a detailed diary, many of the important historical details are often misrepresented.
This skews the story and leads the physician down the wrong path.
So much for the traditional office visit!
The opportunity for better fact-finding happens only at home. Here, within a well strategized plan, a patient can keep meticulous records of important biometrics - such as heart rates and blood pressures - across an extended time period and survey all symptoms at the time they are unfolding.
In as much as a diabetic patient keeps a blood sugar diary, every patient can maintain a diary of important and relevant “tracker information.”
This would then pass on to the physician via a patient portal and/or mobile device and expedite the means by which the physician can review and make a well-informed management decision.
Telemedicine is now defined as the means by which a “patient-detective” delivers invaluable clues to mission control via their handy dandy mobile device. Its convenience may still be echoed in the means of info delivery, but the task in collecting is anything but convenient and requires persistence, commitment and an understanding that better data in means better physician decision-making out.
If telemedicine is seen in this light, its inconvenience may be a labor; but a labor of love if it can save your life.
