Is the waiting room a relic of AI-powered telehealth?

Maybe this sounds familiar: Over the holiday weekend you decided to enjoy the last days of summer, sunbathing and swimming in the lake. Unfortunately, you notice a familiar pain again the next day at work.

Oh noyou say to yourself. Swimmer’s ear.

You’ve had this problem before. It’s not life or death, but it’s certainly annoying. In addition, the pain will worsen if you do not get antibiotics quickly to treat the problem. Unfortunately, the only way you can get the medications you need is to obtain a doctor’s prescription.

And to do that, you must:

● Book a doctor’s appointment as soon as possible.

● Reschedule your schedule to accommodate their availability.

● Ask your boss for time off to meet your doctor.

● Navigate through traffic and find a parking space.

● Sit in a waiting room for 30 minutes. Or longer.

● Ask your doctor for the script and take it to the pharmacy.

If you’re lucky, you’ll have accumulated sick days that you can apply toward this missed work. If you’re not so lucky, your paycheck has just been stopped. And if you are Real Unfortunately, you even had to coordinate schedules with your nanny or partner to manage the time it took to get this simple medicine.

Of course, life doesn’t have to be that difficult.

That is not the case. We live in the AI ​​era. The modern miracle of telehealth is both a product and an outgrowth of our ability to deliver medicine in innovative ways that better serve patients and physicians. This is the premise of the new book I am co-authoring Skip the waiting room: How telehealth will transform medicine for patients and physicians (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 exciting about telehealth, beyond its ability to alleviate the burden of old care, as illustrated in the swimmer’s ear story, are the new ways it can be done to adjust healthcare in combination with artificial intelligence. “AI can support the development of knowledge about clinical processes: for example, how new innovations in therapies and procedures can be leveraged through personalization to customize patient cohorts or individual profiles,” explains researchers Craig Kuziemsky et al. in Medical Informatics Yearbook.

But the usefulness of AI in telehealth is not limited to patients. It is a medical game changer for… doctorsat. As our book shows, the waiting room paradigm has long prevented physicians from living their best lives. Let’s flip the script to reveal the issues that today’s providers also face.

Imagine a doctor who we will call Lisa. Lisa is in her thirties and has two young children. Under the old model, Lisa could expect to be tied to her physical office, spending 40 to 50 hours a week (or more) away from her home and family. But even this demoralizing reality cannot take into account the fact that Lisa is never truly free. Even when she is ‘off’, she must maintain contact with a patient control room if acute needs arise.

This is an example of a toxic work/life imbalance.

It is also not a way to inspire the next generation of healthcare providers to enter a field that already suffers from a shrinking working population. On the other hand, like MedTech intelligence points out, “Telehealth has already become mainstream for physicians in overcoming burnout. When AI and telehealth are combined, the benefits are doubled. AI can help doctors spend less time on their computers. AI can also help detect signs that may indicate burnout symptoms. It can even predict how many patients a doctor could see before he becomes exhausted.”

In addition to easing the burden on both physicians and patients in our outdated healthcare model, telehealth, in combination with AI and big data, is reorienting healthcare from illness to wellness. Remote patient monitoring is central to this idea. Because if the Arizona Telemedicine Program explains: “Monitoring devices such as the Apple Watch, Google Fit and other wearables are used to collect patient information and other vital signs such as heart rate, sleep patterns and physical activity levels. This data is then sent to a secure server where it is accessible to general practitioners, specialists and other healthcare providers.”

There’s 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,” Omer explains. “Even before COVID-19 normalized patients speaking to doctors via apps, we were already using such technology to combat America’s opioid epidemic.”

An important reason for using telecare in the treatment of addiction concerns perception and reputation. Even now, several grueling years into a horrific health crisis that has affected hundreds of thousands of Americans, a demoralizing stigma plagues opioid users and their families. “Unlike, say, cancer or some other disease that does not arouse social disapproval of its sufferers, opioid addiction is widely discredited. It leads to feelings of shame, another barrier to successful treatment,” Omer explains.

Telehealth’s ability to serve patients with unprecedented anonymity provides a solution to this problem. In 2024, patients no longer have to appear in person at an opioid clinic and risk public criticism to obtain prescriptions for medications like suboxone that combat opioid use disorder. Instead, they can speak confidentially to a doctor via their phone to get the care they need.

This example highlights another useful aspect of telehealth. What if there are not opioid clinics where you live? What if you stay in what is called a hospital desert, which lacks such essential facilities and medical specialists?

Telecare, through AI, can also help with this scarcity.

It’s time to imagine another scenario. Let’s say you’re in a rural part of the US where many physicians have left, often due to the same burnout we discussed. You may have a challenging medical condition that requires a specialist in your area.

AI can diagnose your disease through telehealth without a doctor seeing you in person. “AI algorithms make an important contribution to diagnosing and predicting diseases and provide new insights for healthcare,” 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. In oncology, for example, AI algorithms can search radiographic images, genetic information and patient history to detect cancer at an early stage. Similarly, in the field of cardiology, AI models are being used to predict heart attacks and strokes by analyzing ECG patterns and other vital signs.”

It is sometimes said that every problem promises a solution if we just expand our thinking. COVID-19 was a tragedy of monumental proportions. But it did have one positive consequence: the widespread use of telehealth. With the pandemic in the rearview mirror, we can build on the promise of telehealth by finally: graciousoutgrown the waiting room.

It’s exactly what the doctor – and the patients – ordered.