Many forces keep telemedicine from achieving its potential to transform care delivery: the excess workload created for the care provider, the likely change in patients’ health-care-use behavior, the economics of reimbursement, the asinine rule called HIPAA and the obsolete system of different medical licenses for different states.
a few days ago my brother who is 73 years old sent me some pictures.
theses showed me the arm which was badly bruised while he was vacationing in Hawaii.
No, he was nowhere near the erupting volcanos.
After looking at the pictures I reassured him he could complete his vacation and then go see his PCP and get an MRI. His own PCP could not have done this. ( By the way, I and my brother have made a contract that whatever advice medical or nonmedical is strictly between family members and no doctor-patient relationship exists between us. I do not prescribe any medications or order any tests ) this saved him a frantic trip to an urgent care facility or Emergency room in Hawaii, where he would have had to see an out of network physician and have some imaging done at a great cost to him or cut short his vacation and fly back to Houston and beg for an appointment with his busy and overworked PCP.
The same advice, I could provide to a number of new patients de novo or as a second opinion for a reasonable fee all across the earth with the present day technology.
a few days ago my brother who is 73 years old sent me some pictures.
theses showed me the arm which was badly bruised while he was vacationing in Hawaii.
No, he was nowhere near the erupting volcanos.
After looking at the pictures I reassured him he could complete his vacation and then go see his PCP and get an MRI. His own PCP could not have done this. ( By the way, I and my brother have made a contract that whatever advice medical or nonmedical is strictly between family members and no doctor-patient relationship exists between us. I do not prescribe any medications or order any tests ) this saved him a frantic trip to an urgent care facility or Emergency room in Hawaii, where he would have had to see an out of network physician and have some imaging done at a great cost to him or cut short his vacation and fly back to Houston and beg for an appointment with his busy and overworked PCP.
The same advice, I could provide to a number of new patients de novo or as a second opinion for a reasonable fee all across the earth with the present day technology.
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