Will Telemedicine Be a Long-Term Survival Tool for Myeloma Patients?
Will Telemedicine Be a Long-Term Survival Tool for Myeloma Patients? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
What can multiple myeloma patients expect for the use of telemedicine as part of their long-term care? Dr. Sarah Holstein shares her experience of using telemedicine for those with MGUS and those managing controlled disease – and her thoughts about the future of telemedicine.
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Transcript:
Dr. Sarah Holstein
So, I think telemedicine is a really good fit for patients for either long-term survivorship issues or for patients that perhaps you’re just following with the precursor to myeloma, so for example, MGUS (monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance) where overall the risk is low that there’s actually going be a progression to myeloma over their lifetime.
So I have a number of patients who I see perhaps on an annual basis for those types of visits, and of course, over the last year, I’ve been doing a number of those visits via telehealth, and I think they’ve gone really well. It still allows me to ask my entire review of systems where I check through and make sure that there’s no subtle signs that I might be missing that somebody’s plasma cell disorder is progressing. They’ve had their blood work or scans or other testing done, and we can review those, but again, in those types of situations where the risk is low and somebody is doing well and it’s a fairly routine visit, I think the need to do a full physical exam, it’s pretty low, I think whether or not you’d hear anything on the lung exam in somebody who’s doing well and it’s just there for an annual basis exam, I don’t think that lung exam is going to add a whole lot, but really having the ability to still talk to each other, go over laboratory studies, really make sure that I’m not missing any subtle signs that might suggest concomitant lite amyloidosis or progression to myeloma can still very readily be done via telehealth.
