Mass. General Hospital Doctor: ‘Telemedicine Is Here To Stay’

‘As we think about both this pandemic but also the way care is changing, it turns out we can do almost 80 percent of our care via telemedicine. But, I think once we get through the next several months to years we’ll find that telemedicine is here to stay,’ says Dr. Ami Bhatt, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital.

With health care providers currently battling the COVID-19 pandemic, more hospitals than ever before are turning to telemedicine to help a growing number of patients around the U.S. and around the world.

“As we think about both this pandemic but also the way care is changing, it turns out we can do almost 80 percent of our care via telemedicine,” Dr. Ami Bhatt, who works as director of the adult congenital heart disease program at Massachusetts General Hospital, told CRNtv in an interview. “But, I think once we get through the next several months to years, we’ll find that telemedicine is here to stay.”

Today, Bhatt -- who’s been using telemedicine for almost seven years -- sees her fellow colleagues throughout the hospital and health care providers around the country adopting telemedicine practices to connect with patients virtually.

Decades Old Practice

“Telemedicine actually has a lot of history at the Massachusetts General Hospital. It first started several decades ago when flights coming into Boston’s Logan Airport, if they had illnesses there at the airport, the Massachusetts General Hospital would actually offer telemedicine services over to them to help out,” said Bhatt. “And so it was a very different system certainly then than the now, but the concept of helping people who are far away and we can’t get to started a long time ago.”

But it wasn’t until 2013, when she and many others at the hospital began practicing telemedicine.

“It was available for pediatrics, behavioral health and psychiatry, stroke, but many of us in the general medical specialty realized that we had patients coming in from quite far away who needed care,” she said. “We had patients who lived close by, but it’s hard for the 90-year-old to get in on the icy roads in February in Boston. So there were many different use cases for which telemedicine became more helpful.”

Telemedicine Is ‘Rapidly’ Changing

Amid the coronavirus crisis, Bhatt said she began to see the desperation.

“My goodness, [telemedicine] has changed so rapidly just in the past two weeks. You know, before provider adoption was a little bit slow because we were used to seeing patients in the clinic, it’s what we knew,” said Bhatt. “And so although there were a lot of people who liked the idea of technology and trying new things, sometimes when it’s not broke, why fix it. Now it’s broken.”

According to the World Health Organization, the U.S. now leads the world in confirmed coronavirus cases with 140,640 as of Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET. Johns Hopkins University reported more than 3,400 deaths in the U.S. from the illness.

The Best Way To Provide Continuous Care

When it comes to routine health care, Bhatt said, the biggest challenge they face is “episodic health care. You see your doctor once a year.”

“There is so much that happens to you, to your body, to your health in between that time and it’s really not ideal for health care. Now that we have telemedicine, now that we have digital health tools, there are ways that we can actually provide continuous care for patients and I think that’s the direction we’re going to go in,” she said. “And despite how difficult these past few months and the coming few months will be, I think that’s one thing we’re going to see out of this is we’ll be able to offer continuous care and really improve everybody’s health using telemedicine and digital health.”

To learn more, head over to CRNtv.