Written by Michael Ashley
Maybe this sounds familiar: Over the holiday weekend, you decided to soak up the last days of summer, basking in sunshine, swimming in the lake. Unfortunately, the next day back at work, you notice a familiar pain.
Oh no, you say to yourself. Swimmer’s ear.
You’ve had this problem before. It’s not life or death, but it sure is annoying. Also, if you don’t get antibiotics soon to treat the problem, the pain will worsen. Unfortunately, the only way you can get the medication you need is to receive a doctor’s prescription.
And to do that, you must:
- Book a doctor’s appointment, sooner rather than later.
- Move your schedule around to accommodate their availability.
- Ask your boss for time off work to meet with your doctor.
- Navigate traffic and find parking.
- Sit in a waiting room for 30 minutes. Or longer.
- Get the script from your doctor and take it to the pharmacy.
If you’re lucky, you’ve accumulated sick days you can apply to this missed work. If you’re not so lucky, your pay just got docked. And if you’re really unfortunate, you even had to coordinate schedules with your babysitter or partner to manage all the time it took you to get this simple medication.
Surely, life doesn’t have to be this hard.
It doesn’t. We live in the AI age. The modern marvel of telehealth is both a product and an outgrowth of our ability to perform medicine in innovative ways that better serve patients and doctors. This is the premise of the new book I coauthored Skip the Waiting Room: How Telehealth Will Transform Medicine for Patients and Doctors (Fast Company Press, 2024) with Dr. Talib Omer, Jared Sheehan, and Chris Rovin, founders of QuickMD, a telehealth company that rose to prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What’s so exciting about telehealth, beyond its ability to mitigate the hassles of legacy care exemplified in the swimmer’s ear tale, are the novel ways it can customize health care when combined with artificial intelligence. “AI can support the development of knowledge of clinical processes: for example, how to leverage new innovations in therapies and procedures through personalization to match patient cohorts or individual profiles,” explains researchers Craig Kuziemsky et al. in Yearbook of Medical Informatics.
But AI’s utility in the telehealth space isn’t limited to patients. It’s a medical gamechanger for doctors, too. As our book attests, the waiting room paradigm has long stifled physicians from living their best lives. Let’s flip the script to reveal the hassles today’s providers also face.
Imagine a physician we’ll call Lisa. Lisa is in her 30s and has two young kids. Under the legacy model, Lisa could expect to be tethered to her brick-and-mortar office, putting in 40- to 50-hour weeks (or more) away from her home and family. Yet even this demoralizing reality fails to account for the fact Lisa is never really off the clock. Even when she’s “off,” she must be in contact with a dispatch service for patients as acute needs arise.
This is an example of a toxic work/life imbalance.
It’s also no way to inspire the next generation of health-care providers to enter a field already suffering from a shrinking workforce. On the other hand, as MedTech Intelligence points out, “Telehealth has already gone mainstream for doctors in overcoming burnout. When AI and telehealth are combined, the advantages are doubled. AI may help doctors spend less time on their computers. AI may also assist in the detection of signs that may suggest burnout symptoms. It can even forecast how many patients a doctor would be able to visit before becoming exhausted.”
Beyond assuaging the strain on doctors and patients alike in our antiquated legacy care model, telehealth, when combined with AI and big data, reorients care from sickness to wellness. Remote patient monitoring is central to this idea. For as the Arizona Telemedicine Program explains, “Monitoring devices such as the Apple Watch, Google Fit, and other wearables are being used to collect patient information and other vital signs like heart rates, sleep patterns, and physical activity levels. This data is then transmitted to a secure server where it can be accessed by primary care physicians, specialists, and other health-care providers.”
There’s yet another reason why telehealth promises to improve health outcomes in our AI age: Privacy. “Central to QuickMD’s mission is an emphasis on human dignity,” explains Omer. “Even before COVID-19 normalized patients speaking to doctors through apps, we were already using such technology to combat the opioid epidemic roiling America.”
One important rationale for employing telehealth to treat addiction concerns perception and reputation. Even now, several grueling years into a horrific health crisis that’s claimed hundreds of thousands of Americans, a demoralizing stigma plagues opioid users and their families. “Unlike, say, cancer or some other illness which invokes no societal disapproval toward its sufferers, opioid addiction is widely disparaged. It leads to feelings of shame, yet another barrier preventing successful treatment,” explains Omer.
Telehealth’s ability to help patients with unprecedented anonymity presents a workaround to this problem. In the year 2024, patients needn’t appear in person at an opioid clinic and risk public criticism to procure prescriptions for medicines such as suboxone that combat opioid use disorder. Instead, they can confidentially speak to a doctor on their phone for the care they need.
This example brings up another helpful aspect to telehealth. What if there aren’t opioid clinics where you live? What if you reside in what’s called a hospital desert lacking such essentials, as well as medical specialists?
Telehealth, by way of AI, can also assist with such paucity.
It’s time to imagine one more scenario. Let’s say you’re located in a rural part of the U.S. that many doctors have left, often due to the very same burnout we have discussed. It so happens you have a challenging medical condition requiring a specialist absent in your area.
AI could diagnose your malady via telehealth without a doctor seeing you in person. “AI algorithms are becoming important contributors in diagnosing and predicting diseases and offer new insights to health care,” explains Shiva Varnosfaderani et al. for Bioengineering. “These algorithms analyze vast amounts of medical data to identify patterns and correlations that might elude human analysis. For instance, in oncology, AI algorithms can sift through radiographic images, genetic information, and patient histories to detect cancer at early stages. Similarly, in the field of cardiology, AI models are employed to predict heart attacks and strokes by analyzing ECG patterns and other vital signs.”
It’s been said every problem promises a solution if we only expand our thinking. COVID-19 was a tragedy of monumental proportions. But it did have one positive outgrowth: Widespread telehealth usage. Now that the pandemic is in the rearview mirror, let’s build on telehealth’s promise by finally, mercifully, outgrowing the waiting room.
It’s just what the doctor—and patients—ordered.
