Cast & Curious

Tag: telemedicine

  • Telemedicine’s What, Weird and the Wacky! in the New Normal

    COVID 19 whacked this privilege almost overnight and we’re left to deal with providing care, as much as possible from a distance, or we risk harming the patient or us in the process. Even a decade old Telehealth hobbyist like me was unnerved by this disruption. As a healthcare professional, do I really have other choices? So how do we deliver care from a distance? Is it really possible to do this?

    T1. What competencies do I need to provide care from a distance?

    This first came into mind after the COVID 19 disruption sunk in. I had to assess myself. Providing face to face care needed competent health professionals. Factor in distance and you are in what seems to be an entirely new way of way of providing car. What do I need for Telehealth or telemedicine?

    Telehealth includes a broad range of technologies and services to provide patient care and improve the healthcare delivery system as a whole. Telemedicine is a subset of Telehealth which is basically “provision of health care services and education over a distance, using telecommunications technology”. Like any technology adoption, I have a framework for evaluating what applies to me and what do I need to use it. But before that, I always do a “needs assessment”.

    T2. What aspect of telemedicine makes you uncomfortable professionally?

    When I started practicing telemedicine, the blank stares or the zombie like nod from other ends is disconcerting. I have no way of knowing whether the epatient” got what we have discussed or instructed. Limited visual cues, the ever lagging net connection and the frequent restlessness of camera shy patient or me, is disconcerting. Sometimes, no econsult ever happend because we all had the time just figuring out our eclinic.

    T3. What’s the funniest telemedicine encounter you had?

    There’s was once that I was so engrossed talking and giving instructions I didn’t noticed the connection went dead and I was talking to a microphone for 5 minutes. Or the whole mic set up collapsed in my face. Or a patient showing up on the other end with a coke and cake in tow, munching and talking at the same time.

    literary a new world for most of us. COVID-19 made it a necessity for us to provide care. I’m just starting my journey, feeling the bumps, humps and ridiculous encounters here there. I realized though that providing care will never be the same again even after this pandemic. As with any other tool in medicine and health, Telehealth will should help us do what we do most best as health professionals

    Join #HealthXPh twitter chat at 9pm Manila time Sept 12, 2020 as we discuss telehealth, providing care from a distance. 

  • Should Physicians mind their “Webside Manners”?

    Approximately 87% of US adults are online. Of these, a huge 72% seek health information online. Trust for physicians remains high though as 70% of these adults would seek a healthcare professional’s help  for major medical conditions.

    Contrast this trend with how many of physicians are taking advantage of information technology to provide healthcare information online or even clinical care from a distance.  A measly 3% of physicians engages patients online. Even if one in three US physicians use or is planning to use telemedicine, the actual usage of telemedicine by patients is lower though at about 9-15%.

    What these statistics are saying is this: patients are going online for health information but our healthcare system is slow to adapt. The advantages of Telehealth and telemedicine especially for the archipelagic Philippines is pretty obvious but so are the staggering challenges.

    How about Social Media?

    Telemedicine is broadly defined as providing clinical care from a distance, using telecommunication and information technologies. Strictly speaking, social media isn’t part of telemedicine yet. Dr. Joseph Kim pointed out though that there’s a small (albeit increasing) percentage of doctors who use social media to provide health information and professional networking.

    Extending Bedside Manners

    The traditional physician-patient interaction in the clinical setting is governed by a set of attributes, behaviour or communication skills called “bedside manners”. Studies have shown that bedside manners ultimately affect delivery of care. The entry of information technology into actual patient-physician interaction clearly changes too the clinical setting. Perhaps this is an opportune moment for examining how effective a physician’s manners are in the light of information technology or maybe, we need to expand our concept of manners.

    Webside Manners

    The concept of webside manners came with the advent of telemedicine. While “bedside manners” pertains to how a healthcare professional interacts and communicates with a patient in a face to face encounter, webside manners probably refers to how the healthcare professional interacts or communicates with a patient over a medium (of information technology) to provide clinical care.

    So lets talk about “webside manners” this Saturday November 26, 2016 at 9PM Manila time and determine whether it should be (or it should be not) part of our bedside manners:

    • T1. Does Telemedicine have a role in clinical care? How about Social Media?Why or why not?
    • T2. Should our bedside manners need extending, to include webside manners with the advent of information technologies like telemedicine or social media?
    • T3. What webside manners do you think are most needed?

     

    Don’t forget to include hashtag #healthxph when joining the chat on Saturday at 9PM Manila time. See you!

    Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Telemedicine_Consult.jpg

    Resources:

    http://www.pewinternet.org/data-trend/internet-use/latest-stats/
    http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/01/15/health-online-2013/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemedicine
    https://www.accessrx.com/blog/current-health-news/how-many-family-doctors-are-using-telemedicine/
    http://www.mobihealthnews.com/45682/survey-9-percent-of-consumers-have-used-a-telehealth-service