Ask the Expert: Why Digital Doctors Need Advanced Telehealth Technology
Exceptional healthcare delivery requires excellent people, processes, and innovative technology, but the current healthcare landscape presents a critical challenge: a shrinking workforce. Our aging population demands more human resources, yet we see a concerning exodus of clinical personnel from the field.
“The staffing shortages we see across the country means health systems need to leverage what they can,” says Mike Kurliand, MS, BSN, RN, vice president of clinical quality and integration at MedWand. “You must lean on processes and technology. You need to figure out how to treat folks with the tools you have and adopt the technologies that can help streamline workflows and augment clinician capabilities.”
To help mitigate the problem, most healthcare organizations have integrated telehealth into their care delivery models, but Kurliand says traditional telehealth methods have limitations. Learn what they are and how MedWand, a new modern technology, is revolutionizing telehealth visits with unique features that allow healthcare providers to conduct comprehensive virtual exams that were impossible to do before.
What is missing from traditional telehealth?
Remote visits require clinicians to rely on the patient’s medical history and self-reported symptoms, but they want more. They want to hear the heart and lung sounds and get the patient’s temperature. Until now, they kept asking if they could get more of these vitals. The answer was no, not if you’re doing a straight-up audio video.
How does MedWand address limitations?
MedWand is a handheld tool that measures temperature, blood oxygen, and pulse rate. It also
operates like a stethoscope, capturing heart, lung, and abdominal auscultations. The high-definition camera can examine ear canal, throat, and skin conditions while transmitting real-time data to a tablet or computer. This allows for more comprehensive virtual exams from a patient’s home or any location. Clinicians who use MedWand tell us outcomes are improving and that more patients have access to care.
When you say MedWand lets clinicians perform comprehensive home exams, one of ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns of 2024 comes to mind: diagnostic errors and delayed diagnoses. Could MedWand help?
Absolutely. I’ve had many discussions about why this happens. Many factors could be at play, such as staff shortages, clinician burnout and fatigue, poor documentation, noise, disruptions, and lack of access to necessary diagnostic tools. That and more can potentially contribute to errors and missed diagnoses.
For example, pneumonia is one of the top five diseases that go undiagnosed or have a delayed diagnosis. It also puts more than a million people in the hospital and causes over 50,000 deaths annually. One of the things physicians say about telemedicine visits is that patients will mention difficulty breathing, feeling a little lightheaded, or other ambiguous symptoms. Still, they can’t tell if someone has a cold or something more serious.
With MedWand, you can hear if there are any crackles, rails, wheezing, or minimal sounds going through a particular lobe. If you’re doing a video visit without auscultating the lungs, you can miss many things because the number one determining factor is whether the breathing mechanics sound smooth and fluid. If they don’t, get your patient in for imaging or additional workups. On the other hand, if the lungs sound OK, you can avoid unnecessary tests and expenses. MedWand provides the auscultations and captures all the data in real time.
Speaking of data, how do you guarantee the accuracy of what’s captured?
MedWand has FDA clearance, and each of its sensors underwent clinical-grade assessments aligned with the standard of care. This means providers can trust the data and quickly share it with their colleagues for a second opinion or with specialists who can jump in and get the patient into more advanced care if needed.
Do patients embrace this technology? What are they saying?
Providers tell us that using MedWand during remote patient exams encourages patients to take a more significant role in their healthcare. Imagine patients hearing their heart and lung sounds as they happen, compared to having a doctor use a stethoscope in the office where they don’t hear anything. Hearing those vitals at the moment opens the door to meaningful discussions about the importance of sticking to their treatment plan, making lifestyle changes, etc. It also provides opportunities for family members and caregivers to get involved.
How does MedWand affect reimbursement?
Lack of documentation is a significant reason health systems don’t get the reimbursement they deserve. MedWand is an advanced version of telehealth that gives you the data needed to provide the coding insurance companies require. You won’t get the reimbursement if you don’t have that data documented, which often happens if providers see patients back-to-back, and at the end of the day, they may forget to include all the care they provided. MedWand captures the data in real time, which can be used later to submit complete documentation.
What should healthcare providers look for when assessing advanced telehealth technologies?
Besides the essential checkboxes, like compliance and security, you want to know about scalability, ease of use, support, training, and flexibility to incorporate innovations in the future, like AI. MedWand is looking to eventually partner with reputable partners who have developed FDA-cleared AI algorithms, which is critical.
The bottom line is that the healthcare model will need to change. MedWand is designed to facilitate that change by enhancing efficiencies for clinicians and patients and improving healthcare equity by removing some of the barriers to care many patients encounter. From a technological perspective, MedWand is innovative and something the market has been waiting for. We like to think of it as the start of a Tri-Corder from Star Trek.
Sponsored by:
