Telemedicine Moves Forward in the COVID Era

HEALTH AND FITNESS

TELEMEDICINE MOVES FORWARD IN THE COVID ERA

By: Louis Fortis

Physician Tiffany Mullen is board-certified in family and integrative medicine. She is the former medical director of integrative medicine at Aurora Health Care and is currently CEO and cofounder of Vytal Health, a Milwaukee-based telemedicine startup company. We spoke recently about the challenges and opportunities posed to medicine during the pandemic.

The Shepherd Express interviewed you in April. You had left Aurora Health care in 2018 to found Vytal Health. Please remind our readers of what Vytal Health does in the area of telemedicine.

Most telemedicine companies focus on treating urgent care problems (sore throats, sinus infections, etc.), but Vytal Health provides a unique form of telemedicine. We deliver ongoing care to women who are very busy and have medical problems that are often overlooked and undertreated in the typical rushed 10-15-minute office visit. We focus on developing a long-standing relationship with the patient, solving their health problems (instead of just covering symptoms with multiple prescriptions), and create a personalized approach to achieve health now and into the future. We just happen to do this via telemedicine, so it is convenient, simple and accessible.

What are the advantages for a patient of telemedicine?

As I mentioned above, telemedicine simplifies the care experience. In a time when women are stretched with not only their work but also the management of their home, their own and their family’s health, being able to access care anytime, anywhere takes a lot of the stress of out the process. Who wants to get a babysitter, take a long drive across town, sit in a waiting room with sick people and wait for a doctor running behind? It didn’t work before and it doesn’t work now. It’s just not necessary to settle for that anymore.

Seems like a great option for most care. What are some of the challenges of telemedicine?

The obvious disadvantage of delivering care via telemedicine is that if the patient needs to be examined, this can sometimes be challenging. That said, it is estimated that 70% of all medical

problems can be managed via telemedicine. Moreover, there are more and more medical devices that can be integrated into the telemedicine platform that patients can have at home, for example, heart rate monitors, scales, tools to listen to the heart and lungs, etc. These telemedicine-ready tools are available right now, and care is moving in the direction of being at the hands of the patient, with help from the doctor via video, of course, making it so much more convenient and just as effective.

How has the pandemic changed your business? I assume that telemedicine is playing a much larger role at this time when many people are afraid to go into a hospital or clinic.

That is absolutely true! Telemedicine use has exponentially increased, with many telemedicine companies seeing a record number of patients since the pandemic began. And people who were hesitant to try it have found it to be such a valuable way to receive care. As one medical leader put it, the telemedicine “genie is out of the bottle,” and we’re not going back.

Once we have a successful vaccine and the pandemic is pretty much held in check, how much do you think things will go back to a pre-pandemic way of doing medicine? Or, are there some things we learned as both patients and doctors that worked so well that there is no going back to our pre-pandemic way of delivering medical care?

In this current era of COVID, most people have become more familiar with telemedicine, or the use of video to allow patients to interact with doctors remotely, without having to go to a physical clinic.

The pandemic has exposed so many not-so-positive things about the healthcare system: the waste, the inefficiency, the lack of preparedness. Nearly the entire profitability of health care systems is driven by elective procedures, and when those were curtailed by the pandemic, many health care systems fell to their knees financially. Many doctors in these systems were forced to care for patients via telemedicine for the first time, and they realized it could be done very effectively. Many patients with chronic medical conditions who we would be “dragging” to the clinic for routine follow-up were astonished to see how well they could have their problems addressed in this new telemedicine paradigm. So no, I don’t think we are going back to the way we did things before. We will still have clinics and hospitals, but we now know we can do better if we strive to meet patients’ needs in a more flexible, accessible, and efficient way.

Early in the telemedicine movement, insurance companies and Medicare/ Medicaid were not covering telemedicine visits. Has anything changed on that front?

Even before the pandemic, Medicare was moving in the direction of covering telemedicine, and commercial insurance payers are slowly following suit. While we don’t know how all of this will play out just yet, it is important to understand that insurance coverage does not always equal a good, quality experience. I would argue that when, and if, insurance companies get behind telemedicine completely, we will still be grappling with the rushed, transac

tional, volume-based world of traditional medicine, just delivered in via video. We will still need companies like ours whose focus is on spending time with patients and solving their health problems at the root cause, and that is not what insurance companies think is valuable. The first paradigm shift towards covering telemedicine is good, but the shift to covering better medicine—one focused on really helping patients, listening to them, supporting them, personalizing their care and getting them healthy—is what we need. I’m not counting on insurance companies getting behind that any time soon, unfortunately.

If I want to use telemedicine, do I get a telemedicine primary care physician?

Yes, you can have a primary care physician relationship via telemedicine! One of our membership tiers allows you to have a personal physician for all of your care—couldn’t be more convenient and accessible.

How do our readers find out more about Vytal Health?

You can find out more by visiting us at www.vytalhealth.com, or check us out on Facebook or Instagram @yourvytalhealth.