Into the Tele-future Telehealth has stormed into GPs lives providing convenience and headaches.
James Knox reports.
Telehealth may have started slowly but the combination of a pandemic and the introduction of a comprehensive set of MBS item numbers is making it a go-to service for GPs in Australia. While the first wave of the pandemic seems to be in the past, telehealth could well be the future, or at least a more widely adopted service that provides both clinicians and consumers with a convenient and effective alternative to face-toface consultations. Ask a GP if in the course of their career they have taken a phone call from a patient and provided clinical care, and the vast majority would resoundingly have said ‘yes’. However, if you were to ask if that was a billed consultation, there would be an emphatic chorus of ‘no’. And that, in a nutshell, has been the problem with telehealth. Doctors have been providing the service, albeit informally, for a long time without the financial incentive to do more with it. However, this has changed with more than 290 telehealth or telephone item numbers being listed on the MBS since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. 14 | JUNE 2020
Yet, will clinicians continue to use this service when physical distancing measures are rolled back? Will telehealth be an effective and secure alternative to face-to-face care delivery? And will general practice be economically viable if telehealth comprises a larger portion of billable hours?
Useful use case Before the pandemic, the primary use of telehealth consultations was to bridge the distances between clinicians and their patients located in rural and remote areas. They constituted a small portion of doctors’ consultations. However, the reality, now, is that telehealth can be as effective for a patient one kilometre away as it is for one who is 1000km away. And beyond the financial aspect, telehealth complicated the traditional faceto-face delivery and interrupted clinicians’ daily work flow, said Dr Nathan Pinskier, a Melbourne-based GP, director and co-owner of the Medi7 group of practices and former chair MEDICAL FORUM | MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE
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