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PATIENT EMPOWERMENT NETWORK
Dr. Kvedar
A lot of remote monitor is done in an asynchronous way. For example, you might step on a scale every morning, take your blood pressure and heart rate, and that personal health data is securely transmitted to your healthcare provider and winds up in your electronic health record. Then a nurse or other provider could look at your data and put in a call to you if something was not quite right, and you'd have a dialogue. Again, it could be a video call or an audio call, but you'd have a dialogue with your provider about what was going on -- maybe your diet was off, or maybe you need to increase your medicine dose, but that's typically how it's done. It's not usually done with real-time readings. Can you speak to what telemedicine care looks like in the era of COVID-19? I'll start with statistics from my own large delivery system in Boston to give you a flavor, and by the way, our numbers are not unique. February of 2020, across two academic hospitals, we did about 1600 virtual encounters. In March, we did 89,000 and in April we did 242,000. We are not unique because I've been talking to my colleagues around the country and everyone's having that kind of accelerated demand for telehealth services, what we would call hockey stick growth, partly because, to help stop the spread of the virus, people need to stay at home, yet we still have to take care of our patients. The technology that you and I are using for this interview is common now, whether it be Zoom or Skype or FaceTime. People are, for the most part, comfortable with video calls, and likewise, patients have really taken to it. Patients generally have been very, very positive. Doctors are warming to it.
Honora Miller:
Dr. Kvedar:
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