Sudden Future: The Rise of Telemedicine During COVID-19

When the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic began to spread rapidly in the US in early March, nearly every institution across the country was given a Darwinian ultimatum: adapt, or get left behind.

The medical field was no different.

For many medical professionals, telemedicine was widely discussed theory of practice; its actual use was a more limited, tame version to what they could envision it being.

COVID-19 changed that.

The pandemic forced people home and cancelled traditional medical appointments, imposing new standards of living on everyone—not just those who became infected. But those standard harbored opportunity to implement new technologies and strategies as the field embarks on a new frontier of healthcare.

In our seven-part feature series, “Sudden Future: The Rise of Telemedicine During COVID-19,” the editors of HCPLive® highlight some of the success stories and struggles in specialties across healthcare as they weave their way through learning new techniques on the fly to adapt to an ever-changing pandemic landscape.

In the series, we tackle how telemedicine is being used on the frontline, why psychiatry had a head start in implementing supplemental digital programs to help patients, and how electronic health records can be tweaked to streamline services and improve patient care.

We report on a 1300-practitioner survey conducted on the past, present, and future of telemedicine, and how telehealth could help with the never-ending burnout problems.

What did we learn?

It’s complicated, but the landscape of telemedicine could continue change, to the betterment of physicians and patients alike.

“Candidly, it just went through the roof as far as the demand, because people still wanted to keep their appointments with their providers, but they didn’t want to come into the hospital or clinic and be in a waiting room and potentially be exposed to other people with COVID,” Jim Sheets, MBA, Vice President of outreach services at Intermountain Healthcare said of the new demand for telehealth services.