Do Telephone-Only Visits Qualify As a Telemedicine Visit

Do Telephone-Only Visits Qualify As a Telemedicine Visit?

Do Telephone-Only Visits Qualify As a Telemedicine Visit? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.

For head and neck cancer patients, do telephone-only visits really qualify as a telemedicine visit? Watch as expert Dr. Samantha Tamfrom Henry Ford Health System explains care concerns that can be covered in telephone versus video visits – and patients who can benefit from the use of virtual visits. 

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Transcript:

Samantha Tam, MD, FRCSC, MPH: 

So from a… Telephone-only visits have a lot of drawbacks to them, I think even virtually assessing a patient with regards to how they’re doing generally, a general physical examination is very important. On top of that, we have a lot of sensitive conversations in patients that have head and neck cancer, so it’s important to also read things like non-verbal body language, so definitely the video component is extremely useful for providers that are caring for patients with head and neck cancer. However, in patients that might not have access to video visits, might not have the technology, I think that the number one priority in our minds is that this patient gets the best care that they are able to get, and whether that this means a telephone-only type of a visit is possible for these patients, we adjust our…I guess we adjust our requirements, we adjust our ability to deliver care based on that, so that might mean touching base with the patient on the phone at first in order to understand exactly what they’re going through, talk them through the next steps so that they know what to accept in order to make their care more streamlined later on. I don’t think that telephone visits will completely replace either virtual visits or in-person visits, but I think that, again, they are a tool, and they’re a tool that especially patients that might be more disadvantaged, such as not having access to good Internet might not have access to the technology required for a virtual visit, those patients need to be considered when we consider utilizing telephone-only care.