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The friendly face of your doctor pops up on your screen. They ask how you’re doing with your diabetes. You email over your latest blood glucose levels and the doctor reviews them with you in real-time. You discuss any symptoms you’ve been having and they check up on your exercise log, prodding you to do a bit more between now and the next check-in. Some adjustments are made, a prescription update is sent electronically to your pharmacy, and you close out the call in 15 minutes.
You just had your regular check-in with your doctor and you didn’t even have to change out of pajamas to do it. Welcome to telemedicine.
Telemedicine takes many forms these days. According to the American Telemedicine Organization it includes,
Patient consultations via video conferencing, transmission of still images, e-health including patient portals, remote monitoring of vital signs, continuing medical education, consumer-focused wireless applications, and nursing call centers, among other applications.
Sermo’s own iConsult is a form of telemedicine that has helped physicians confer with colleagues around the country. Physicians as diverse as Dr. Ben LaBrot, founder of Floating Doctors, and Dr. Richard Armstrong, a rural Minnesota surgeon, both use iConsult to improve patient outcome and care.
In short, telemedicine is alive and well and we see nothing but growth. We have literally had thousands of discussions about cases inside Sermo, all HIPAA compliant. Time and again, we’ve seen the impact that crowd-sourced medical consultations can have.
Where Telemedicine is Going
One survey found that 70 percent of all physician visits could be handled via telemedicine. Patients can save time and improve convenience, possibly increasing the number of “visits” with a doctor because they don’t have to find time to get to the doctor’s office. When you merge telemedicine with electronic health records (EHRs), there is a lot of streamlining that can happen.
We asked our physicians if they’ve tried telemedicine yet and the results speak for themselves. 32 percent have either tried it or plan on trying it. As one psychiatrist put it, there are “advantages like not sharing a waiting room with sick people, easy to reschedule, getting to see the patient’s home, family, etc. I, and patients, have used smartphones, tablets, desktops, so far all with Skype.”
An emergency room physician added, “Telemedicine can be a very useful supplement for small hospitals/clinics, or remote facilities. A local practitioner can supplement the physical examination with diagnostic tools (otoscope, ophthalmoscope, stethoscope, etc.) that can be seen by the distant consultant, and can carry out the physical examination and history taking under direct supervision. The sticking point, as so much these days in medicine, is compensation for the distant consultant.”
Compensation and Telemedicine
Should physicians get paid the same amount for a consultation via phone or video as they do in person? While there is less impact to their office staff because the patients doesn’t use the facilities, they are still sharing time and their expertise to benefit the patient’s outcome. We’re hearing that some private insurers are reimbursing the same and others are not.
What do you think? Should physicians seriously consider telemedicine as another way to communicate with patients? Have you tried it and seen positive outcomes? Are you concered about HIPAA when consulting electronically? We’ll be discussing this in detail inside Sermo. If you’re an M.D. or D.O., please join us.
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