Millcreek (or any of the professional healthcare folks here), what, in your opinion, is the current state of telemedicine? My insurance offers it, but I've never tried it. I'm amenable to it as part of my health care, but don't know much about benefits vs detriments.
I'm not a healthcare professional, but I'm finding the limitations of "telemedicine."
Case 1: My cardiologist. I have a 6-month follow-up appointment for next week. I've been informed that it will be a "virtual" appointment. I don't know what virtual meeting app or program or system his practice uses, but it doesn't matter because I use a desktop computer that doesn't have a microphone and doesn't have a web cam. So it's going to be telephonic.
At every "real" appointment, before I see the doctor they take vitals and run an EKG. Obviously, they can't do that over the phone -- even if I had a web cam. As it happens, a few years ago the VA hospital set me up with a blood pressure machine, which also records pulse rate. And a couple of years ago I bought a pulse oximeter. And I own a scale. So I can take vitals. My cardiologist knows this, because I've shared my personal records with him in the past. Coincidentally (for those who believe in coincidence), not long before the coronavirus arrived I bought from Amazon a "personal EKG." It's a little, hand-held device. It doesn't produce a hospital-grade, 12-lead EKG, but ti does produce a graph, which I can download, print, and forward to the doctor. I showed it to the doc at my last appointment and he thought it was cute. Now he thinks it's great, because I can run EKGs for a day or three before the appointment and upload those along with my vitals, and he'll have something to look at when we talk.
Case 2: I had a call today from one of the doctors at the VA hospital, in response to a question I had left several days ago about a possible injection where I had cut a toe. He wanted to do a virtual appointment. They use an app called Doximity. The deal was that he called on my cell phone, not my home phone. (I didn't know they had my cell phone number -- shame on me for letting them get it.) He said he was going to hang up, send me a message from/through Doximity, and I could tap the message and that was supposed to initiate a face-to-face session in which I could use the phone's camera to let him look at the toe.
He hung up. I received the message. When I tapped it to start the chat session, I was prompted to agree to allow the app to access my phone's camera and microphone. I agreed to both ... and then I got an error message that the app had not been able to access my camera and microphone. I went through this three times, and then I gave up. The doc called back later and I explained that the connection hadn't worked for me. So I used a regular digital camera to take photos of the toe, which I then uploaded through the VA's My HealtheVet system, and he was able to access the photos from that. He then called me back and we were able to finish the discussion.
Bottom line: I'm not at all convinced that telemedicine is ready for prime time.