Do you want to drive to the doctor’s office, sit in the waiting room full of other sick patients, look at your watch wondering when you’ll be called?
Personally I’d rather wait to see the doctor from my house rather than in a waiting room full of runny noses.
It’s rare that any of my doctors have done a hands on examination, except to listen to my lungs, so telehealth sounds better and also using it my doctor can’t scold me for my blood pressure.
According to National Library of Medicine. “Telemedicine was underused and understudied until the COVID-19 pandemic, during which reduced regulations and increased payment parity facilitated a rapid increase in telemedicine consultation.
“Telemedicine health care has grown in the United States since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and will remain an integral part of medical care.”
COVID put me into a hermit mode. Fortunately I didn’t get it. My friend Mabel was hospitalized when she got it and can’t even tell me what it felt like. I’m glad I don’t know but am glad telehealth is a normal part of medical care.
Lake County has a large population of senior citizens who would, and do, benefit from telehealth.
I recently had an appointment that was important but I had no transportation to get there so my doctor’s office rescheduled that in-person appointment to a telehealth appointment. Excellent. In fact my doctor seemed more at ease than he is in the in-person room, which is a very small room. He even made a joke…a dumb doctor’s joke.
A dive into the web found that Cedars Sinai offers Virtual Second Opinions, which provides access to specialized expertise from a world renowned hospital. To get this second opinion that can give confirmation of a diagnosis or suggest alternative treatments is not cheap. It isn’t covered by most insurance and for California residents would cost (at the time of this writing) $590. For out of state residents the cost would be $790.
Research into the National Center for Health Statistics showed that medical specialists and primary care physicians were likely to be satisfied with telemedicine, however surgical specialists indicated that telemedicine technology wasn’t appropriate for their patients.
People I asked about telemedicine have mostly been positive about it. My friend Ben has had several telehealth visits with his doctor in San Francisco via Zoom, which he likes much better than driving the distance down from Lake County to UCSF.
However he was warned by his doctor that her telehealth was to run out at the end of 2025 so he said, “Make sure you check your insurance to see if it’s covered. I don’t want to pay if it’s not covered.”
Ben made a good point.
A spending package that the president signed late Nov. 12 extends Medicare’s coverage of home tele health services for 80 days until Jan. 30 as part of a deal to end the longest shutdown in the nation’s history. (www.AARP.org)
“It’s probably the only good thing that came out of COVID, frankly, in terms of improving access because it’s been such a resounding success,” Nicholas Widmyer, director of federal affairs for the National Association of Community Health Centers based in Bethesda, Maryland, said earlier this year. An end to these services “would be a step backwards for a lot of our patients’ ability to access primary care.”
“We are in a race against time,” says Kyle Zebley, ATA senior vice president for public policy. Failure to extend the current telehealth provisions “potentially leave[s] millions without the ability to access a health care provider remotely and set[s] back the clock on technological progress in care delivery.”
What’s a girl to do?…read the fine print in the next spending package signed by the president and check my insurance coverage.
Lucy Llewellyn Byard welcomes comments lucywgtd@gmail.com
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