Dr. Tony Das of Connected Cardiovascular Care Associates in Dallas, Texas shares first-hand experience shifting his interventional cardiology practice to 100 percent remote during COVID-19. Find more information at https://www.veindirectory.org/magazin...
Transcript: We saw, probably 20, 25 patients today by telemedicine. I look back over the last four weeks and March 10th was the first day that patient in Dallas was diagnosed with COVID-19. That Monday we already served 25% of our patients with telemedicine. By the following Monday it was 50% by the following Monday was 90%. And by now it's 100% in a matter of just a few short weeks. Part of it is the evolution of making a decision to keep our staff safe and to keep in line with all the shelter in place. We made these decisions as time went on and we were able to flip the switch on telemedicine. Literally overnight. I was out of town when we actually turned the system on on a Sunday for Monday. What should our doctors do today? What can they do today if they've not been terribly involved with telemedicine? Should they just start with a zoom consultation? See how that goes? Are there benefits to starting now? There's absolutely benefits to starting now. In fact, I think that it's imperative that we continue communication with our patients. One of the things that I have found really interesting and really heartwarming is that we've reached out to patients that had testing schedule or didn't even have an office visit and said, ‘Hey, we just wanted to touch base with you. Would you like to schedule a telemedicine visit to just touch base?’ And we wanted to make sure that they didn't feel like they were being abandoned or just being shuffled to another two months down the road. The overwhelming response is, ‘absolutely, we'd love to catch up and just touch base.’ And we originally thought maybe this would be a burden on patients to have to communicate when all they're really coming in for was a followup for a test or something like that. But the response has been almost a hundred percent of them do want to be communicated with and that gives them a sense that they're being cared for. So I would tell anyone who's even considering it, this is not the time to disengage with your patients. I think it's a time to totally engage with them, even if it's for a quick few minute catch up, just to let them know that you know you're there and we've found many, many patients who would have otherwise just not followed up who when we get them on the phone, we say, ‘okay, well, you know, you have a way of checking your blood pressure. What is it? Oh, it's 200 over a hundred or, you know, I just had an episode last night where I had weakness and slurred speech on one side, or by the way, my left leg is feeling cold.’ So literally things that patients would have ignored that are really critical problems we're hearing during the televisits things that need to be addressed and evaluate and that assessed that would have otherwise led to an emergency room visit. I think the key here is that we're picking up disease and, and suffering by just communicating with the patients, which I think is the imperative right now. So your question was, should people embark on this, on this path? I think it's absolutely a yes, and I think to start with something simple, go to your electronic health record and see if there's a telemedicine option there. Ask your administrators if there is and if there's not, then there are free versions out there of things, that can be incorporated and you can use them in conjunction ( you're typing into your electronic health record while you have a queuing system or a video system right next to you), and we do that some of the time. So we may use Doxy on a patient that Doxy.me is a very well established platform. I've been using it for my wife's aesthetic business for a couple of years and now when this started we were able to just turn it on quickly here. But we also had an embedded system inside our electronic health record. But there are plenty of them out there that are either free or very inexpensive and just start with one and start using it.
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