Doctors go virtual as coronavirus changes medical system forever

WILL visiting the doctor ever be the same again?

In a matter of weeks, the coronavirus pandemic sparked a technological revolution in health care systems across the world that might otherwise have taken years.

Spurred on by fears of contagion in wards and waiting rooms, many health practitioners are replacing the face-to-face meetings that have always underpinned general practice, with patient consultations by telephone and online video apps.

Some of the most radical changes have been in primary health care, where doctors have often faced shortages of protective equipment.

But specialists in everything from mental health to eye care have also turned to technology to treat patients at a distance.

“General practice has undergone significant changes in the way GPs and our teams have delivered patient care during the pandemic — and the speed in which these changes were implemented has been remarkable,” said Professor Martin Marshall, Chair of Britain’s Royal College of GPs.

As the virus spread, health authorities in the UK, Europe and elsewhere updated guidance on everything from data protection to how to build trust remotely.

The United States rolled back restrictions on access to telemedicine, and eased privacy regulations to allow people to use platforms like Skype and FaceTime.

“People are now seeing this model, which we thought would take years and years to develop,” Chris Jennings, US policy consultant and former White House health care adviser told STAT news recently.

“And it’s probably been accelerated by a decade.”

Globally, 58 percent

of surveyed countries are now using telemedicine, the World Health Organization said on Monday.

The WHO said that figure was 42 percent among low income nations.

Layla McCay, a director at the NHS Confederation representing British health care services, said most of the UK’s 1.2 million daily face-to-face primary care consultations were done remotely “in the space of weeks.”

But there were challenges. “My first video consultation was a mess. Builders were drilling, the microphone failed, a colleague walked in, and lockdown was imminent,” Camille Gajria, a doctor and clinical teaching fellow at Imperial College London, told the British Medical Journal.

She said teleconsultations can be efficient but warned of “cognitive bias” — a doctor, for example, might assume that a child playing in the background is the one being discussed.

There are also concerns that vulnerable patients might find it difficult to talk about mistreatment at home.

And there are also concerns that elderly people could struggle to navigate unfamiliar technology.

Telemedicine may seem like a product of the Internet age, but it has been around for decades, developing alongside communications technology.

One big leap came during the space race of the 1960s, when scientists worried about the effect of zero gravity on the human body.

Would it impede blood circulation or breathing?

To find out, both the US and Soviet Union conducted test flights with animals hooked up to medical monitoring systems that transmitted biometric data back to scientists on Earth.

(AFP)