![]() Take a recent virtual visit: A patient scheduled an online consultation after experiencing heart palpitations. But this crisis has made these technologies even more relevant. Take advantage of remote devices.įor years, cardiologists have used remote monitoring devices such as pacemakers to gather important patient data. The number of patients who have expressed gratitude for our office’s efforts to keep them safe while providing care has blown me away. What has been abundantly clear is that patients appreciate this new experience. Make sure to have your chart in hand before sending the invitation. If I sent it too soon before I was ready, I learned that patients will often wait only one and a half to two minutes online before abandoning the visit. Personally, one of the hardest things to figure out was when to send the invitation to join a visit. Usually, that’s sent by email or text so the patient can simply click a link and the telemedicine platform can automatically load. Also, let them know how they will receive an invitation for the visit to begin. ![]() When your office calls to confirm an appointment, make sure to ask your patients about their devices, whether that be a smartphone, regular phone, tablet or computer, because the experience will be different depending on the device. It’s important to set expectations for the visit. Sure enough, within a couple of minutes of our appointment time, armed with his smartphone, he and I were talking by video chat. One of my patients, an 80-year-old man, had never had a telemedicine appointment before. But they are quick to catch on, if given the right information up front. While most physicians have some experience in a telemedicine environment, I would venture that most patients do not. Here are some of my lessons learned: Help patients through the journey. To make these visits as effective as possible, it takes a combination of patient engagement, technology and revised processes to make everything run smoothly. While telemedicine can’t be used to perform the full range of examinations on my heart patients, like a stress test or complete echocardiogram, virtual visits work remarkably well for a number of conditions. It took our department less than a week from the time we made the decision to adopt telemedicine as our new normal to our first office visit. Since then, about 90 percent of Summit Medical Group’s cardiology office visits (and about 70 percent across the whole Group) have been through a video or telephone consult. For those practices still considering or in the process of making the move, know this: It’s easier than you might expect.Īt Summit Medical Group, we had been piloting a telemedicine program for a year within primary care but had conducted zero virtual patient office visits at my cardiology practice before the outbreak. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many physician groups had to quickly turn years of talking about telemedicine into implementing a virtual care program almost overnight. Beamer, MD FACC, Chair of Cardiology at Summit Medical Group
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