Telehealth visits keep medical research going
If you or someone in your family has needed physical or mental health care in the last seven months, the odds are pretty high that you’ve used telehealth.
Although telehealth has been evolving slowly over the last 15 to 20 years — especially in terms of using video technology in addition to phone calls — the COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for the massive increase in telehealth this year.
Nationwide Children’s Hospital, for example, was a few months into a twoto three-year plan to expand telehealth access across the institution.
In March, that plan was immediately fast-tracked to bring providers online for telehealth.
Between mid-march and mid-june, more than 100,000 telehealth visits were completed. This rapid expansion was due in a large part to expanded reimbursement for telehealth visits from public and private insurers.
While telehealth expansion has been essential to providing care for many patients these last seven months, it has also helped clinical research continue.
Conducting clinical research (like everything else) during a global pandemic is challenging.
Bringing patients in for clinical trial visits — especially visits that are for research purposes only and not related to the treatment of a condition — wasn’t possible for months.
To keep research projects on track, researchers at the Abigail Wexner Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s embraced telehealth, from phone visits to video visits and secure emails for photos. By utilizing telehealth, clinical researchers were able to continue many studies with minimal interruption. It also gave families a way to access the study teams for questions and support.
In research, as well as in the clinical setting, telehealth is poised to continue making a lasting impact on how people interact with health care professionals.
But the promise of telehealth for the future won’t (and shouldn’t) be limited to voice and video calls. Voice-assisted technology, apps and wearable monitoring devices are currently being investigated and could support clinical research studies as well as increasing access to care.
The obstacles to using those methods could include concerns about reimbursement, access to reliable internet connections, deficiencies in speechrecognition technology, privacy and integration with electronic health records. However, aside from speech-recognition, these are many of the same hurdles that are being overcome to bring video visits to the forefront.
So, the question ultimately becomes not “if” we can solve these concerns to expand the scope, reach and impact of telehealth, but “when.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has had many lessons to teach us. I hope that one of them is how telehealth technology can improve access to services, advance research and help usher in a new era of health care delivery.
Abbie.roth@nationwidechildrens.org