Telehealth is healthcare that is delivered over an audio-visual medium – like a computer screen or a smart phone. Even regular phone calls might be considered telehealth in certain situations. The concept for telehealth has been around for years. Mostly it had been done with psychiatry or behavioral health entities.
Some specialties are more conducive to others for using telehealth. You can’t do open-heart surgery via telehealth, but you could talk to your healthcare provider about your congestive heart failure symptoms, including weighing yourself at home and maybe even using a home blood pressure machine if you have one.
If you felt like you needed to show your provider a rash, you could do that with your computer (moderately difficult) or your smart phone (easy). With practice, you might even be able to show your provider your sore throat or swelling of your gums or teeth.
Obviously, with telehealth, your provider can’t do a hands-on physical exam, but it might surprise you how you still might be able to be taken care of.
Something you may not know is that the greatest amount of information a provider needs to make a decision about what needs to be done for your health comes from what you tell your provider – the history you’re able to give about what’s bothering you. Providers typically use the physical exam (as well as labs and x-rays) to confirm what they suspect is going on from the history you gave them.
Does a healthcare provider always need to perform a physical exam? Maybe not. For example, a urinary tract infection might present with pain during urination and lower pelvic discomfort. This is very common in women and may not necessarily need a face-to-face visit (though it might in certain situations).
If you added fever and flank pain to the regular urinary symptoms, then your provider would likely decide you couldn’t do telehealth. Instead, he or she would likely bring you in for a face-to-face visit.
There may also be cases where you’re able to drop by a clinic and leave a urine sample or get blood drawn in preparation for a telehealth visit later.
So how do you get set up for telehealth? The first thing to do is call your healthcare provider to see if they offer this service. If they do, usually their staff can walk you through the nuances of performing telehealth given what type of telehealth their clinic is using.
Telehealth won’t replace face-to-face office visits, but it will be another mechanism to access certain types healthcare in the future.
Dr. Mark Horrocks is the Chief Medical Officer of Health West Inc. Health West offers telehealth for medical, behavioral health, and certain dental visits.
