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E-Visits To the Doctor To Top 75 Million In the US, Canada This Year
Lucas123 (935744) writes "Telehealth medicine, or communicating remotely with patients through electronic means, will be used by nearly one in six North Americans this year, according to Deloitte. With an aging Baby Boomer population and a growing shortage of primary care physicians, electronic visits (eVisits) reduce both time and cost in treating common ailments. The overall cost of in-person primary physician visits worldwide is $175 billion. Globally, the number of eVisits will climb to 100 million this year, potentially saving over $5 billion when compared to the cost of in-person doctor visits. Last November, The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) revamped its patient portal, renaming it MyUPMC, and rolling out AnywhereCare, offering patients throughout Pennsylvania eVisits with doctors 24 hours a day, seven days a week either over the phone or through video conferencing. The service offers a 30-minute or less wait time and saves the hospital system more than $86 per patient over a traditional visit."
With amazing modern technology you can, in the comfort and privacy of your very own home (certainly with more comfort and likely more privacy than a typical clinic) take your temperature, pulse, blood pressure and oxygenation. The whole kit would cost less than $100. While it is true that the physical exam is often important, in reality it's a smallish bit of the diagnostic tree. Certainly telemedicine can't solve every issue, but then again, neither will a visit to a doctor's office.
Just one more change in medicine. Next up: You won't really be seeing a doctor (or nurse) on the screen. Just an avatar and a script.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The AMA and HIPAA will not let that happen.
Why in the heck would you think that is true? Where I work every single bit of handwritten information about you is already sent to the Philippines for transcription. Nearly everything else is too because electronic records are sent for medical coding. A Bangladeshi company handles collections so they have access to nearly all of your information so they can do their job. Also, we sell discharge data to several foreign companies, because Bill Archer, a stupid DINO like the rest of the so-called Democrats in this country, decided that information should not be protected.
Even worse is that HIPAA is limited to only a select few people. If you're not a "covered entity," then you are under no requirement to protect patient privacy.
Does the amount of savings expected include the additional costs of misdiagnosis that might be higher over the phone than in-person? Alternately, the savings could be even higher if it leads to serious conditions being diagnosed sooner from people being more willing to make a phone call than visit the hospital.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
This article is total nonsense:
Electronic visits or telemedicine is comprised of electronic document exchanges, telephone consultations, email or texting, and videoconferencing between physicians and patients.
So you call your doctor: "please refill my cholesterol pills"
That counts as an evisit.
Your doctor sends you message: "Your test results are in"
That counts as an evisit.
The summary makes it sound like there were 75million video conference visits... which is not even remotely the case.
The patient gets plenty of benefits from this, one being not having to go to the clinic and wait in line, not having to drive somewhere, not having to interrupt your day. With mobile Internet you should be able to connect to a doctor on the go.
There are costs associated with setting the system up and training the stuff to work with it, to maintain and support it, but the benefits are for both, the hospitals, clinics and for patients.
In any case, you are not forced to use it.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
There are many primary care doctors in the US that are at least as good as foreign doctors. However, there are many things that factor into your observation. The first is that many highly skilled physicians choose to sub-specialize because it is both more academically stimulating and more lucrative (I am a sub-sub-specialized physician). For better or worse, the field is geared toward sub-specialization. This dilutes the number of quality primary care physicians. It also puts a ton of time pressure on primary physicians, since we have fewer primary physicians per capita than many other nations. They simply don't have time to perform thorough exams so they rely on referrals and testing.
Also, there are expectations by patients placed on primary physicians for tests and drugs. Primary physicians, under financial and practice pressure to keep things moving, tend to get into a pattern of giving the patients what they want to keep things moving. This tends to create bad habits. I will say that this happens much less at good academic institutions where there are somewhat less financial pressures and physicians try to keep up to date due to their academic status.
I do also believe there has been some erosion in physical exam skills in modern physicians that come from less reliance on them. If you can get a chest film to diagnose pneumonia, why waste 10 minutes percussing on a patients back? In reality, the sensitivity and specificity of percussion of a skilled physician is probably significantly less than a chest film, and if you're not facile, then forget it.