6 minute read
By Emily Sherry
A Telemedicine Response to the Pandemic
By Emily Sherry
Beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic, Long School of Medicine volunteers and medical students rotating on the Family Medicine clerkship had the opportunity to be a part of the COVID-19 Infectious Diseases Virtual Outpatient Team. As part of the team, we contacted patients via phone calls who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 after hospital discharge or after diagnosis at 5 days and 14 days. Our major goals included monitoring patients’ symptoms and a COVID-19 illness course, offering medical resources, escalating patient care to infectious disease specialists when needed, connecting patients with primary care and listening to patients’ other, nonmedical needs.
Through the experience on the COVID-19 Infectious Diseases Virtual Outpatient Team, I felt we all gained a more personal understanding of the needs of patients within our San Antonio and Texas communities, as well as the macrocosm of the pandemic. By contributing to phone follow-ups, we developed educational and clinical skills that better enabled us to serve the needs of patients right now. Not only has the experience been a chance for our outpatient team to reach a large number of people and maintain contact, but also the virtual person-to-person encounter has given us a foundation to reflect and build upon how we envision ourselves as physicians serving patients in the future.
We won’t always be caring for patients in a pandemic setting, yet certain themes transcend all medical work and time. For me personally, serving different roles as medical team member, educator, support system and advocate illuminated various timeless professional development questions. How will we care for patients when we don’t have all the answers for them? How will we educate patients during scenarios in which many unknowns surround their condition? And as our fellow medical communities fight for the human person, what will our response be as health care professionals? In reflecting, I was reminded of reverberating motifs that drew me to medicine in the first place. These motifs include the value of being truly present with the human person; bringing the passion, compassion and joy for medicine that carried me to this calling into every patient experience; and always respecting the dignity of the human person in how I advocate and care for them.
I think medical professionals have been adapting and growing to address this pandemic with creativity, courage, flexibility and teamwork, amidst uncertainty and unpredictability. Notably, we face the same question that we answered every day before COVID-19 through our actions, mindset and integrity that we bring to the clinical environment: How will we care for our patients today?
In the momentous crucible of COVID-19, the question has remained the same, but is textured to the rapidly changing circumstances of health care and our world. Currently, telehealth is playing a major role in making health care more accessible and safer for patients and clinic teams. Being a part of the COVID-19 Infectious Diseases Vir-
tual Outpatient Team has been a meaningful way to learn about COVID-19 with an epidemiological perspective. I also enjoyed personally reaching out to those affected by COVID-19 on the community level. Listening to patients, answering their questions and showing them we cared by closely following up until patients returned to their baseline or felt comfortable was incredibly valuable for our clinical education. Moreover, I enjoyed developing the ability to host quality, effective virtual visits and establishing rapport and trust with the patient on the other side of the phone line.
In the fall of 2020, a time marked with a great deal of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths, testing positive for COVID-19 was a distinctly vulnerable and frightening experience. In the voices of our patients diagnosed with COVID-19, I heard a range of human emotions, understandably weighted by confusion, frustration and fear. Our telemedicine calls were also met with great gratitude, as they provided patients the chance to discuss specifics of their illness course and receive reliable information based on current medical recommendations. Patients inquired most about their symptoms, expected recovery and ability to safely return to loved ones and work after quarantine.
At times, however, people needed connection with additional medical care. I remember calling to check in on a woman who had been diagnosed with COVID-19 two months earlier. Initially, I expected her to respond with a recovery story, but quickly learned she had persistent and worsening COVID-19 symptoms that week that were impairing her ability to function. She did not know at what threshold she should seek medical care, but described feeling like a “walking zombie.” She thanked me deeply for caring and addressing her change in condition, and I escalated her care to our infectious disease specialist for further medical evaluation and management. Working with this patient reminds me of the privilege we have as medical professionals to help patients feel seen and be heard. This conversation also underscores that simple actions such as phone check-ins can play important roles in good medical care. As physicians, we must recognize that sickness can equate to lost work time, medical bills and sizable inconvenience. And thus sometimes, we need to expressly give our patients the encouragement to pursue their health and to remind them that their well-being has immeasurable worth.
While virtual meetings are not typically a medical professional’s ideal for the health care experience, the pandemic has motivated a vivid response for the health care system and the provider as an individual to both embrace and evolve telehealth. I am also optimistic that our critical use of telehealth now will help improve the accessibility of health care for patients in the future, so that when in-person visits are safe enough to be the default, we will have bridged many gaps that existed before COVID-19. It is my hope that our system and its clinicians will be better trained, informed and prepared to apply telehealth not as the default, but as an option for individuals and communities who were previously underserved. In the post-COVID19 era, which we are pursuing with hope and motivation, how will health care be changed? Step-by-step, how are we approaching and seeing the question differently because of the environment we are embracing and responding to?
When I repeat the question again, “How will we care for patients today?” how do we answer? We will probably make more phone calls to patients than usual, we will sanitize our hands and instruments more than we ever thought to in the past and we will intentionally find new ways to connect with patients through the phone or through the mask. When we answer the question, “How will we care for patients today?” I think the context looks different, textured by the pandemic, but the answer is the same as it always was. We will stay true to the heart of medicine and answer by serving the human person placed in our care in whatever ways we can offer. For as long as the fire burns, as long as the world turns, we are here and that means one thing: we are caring for you today.
Emily Sherry is a Medical Student at the Long School of Medicine, UT Health San Antonio, Class of 2022.
