Leveraging Telemedicine Post-Op

The following is a guest article by Dr. Nadeem Dhanani, MD, MPH and Medical Director of Urology, Modernizing Medicine.

There has been a great deal of discussion over the last year and a half about the value of telemedicine and its potentially transformative benefits long term. Often, these high-level conversations allude to the use of telemedicine for primary and preventative care, broadly increasing access to care and reducing the risk of transmission in waiting rooms. However, there is another crucial healthcare setting where telemedicine may have even more value and utility: post-operative care.

Across healthcare specialties, leveraging telehealth in place of in-person visits may help achieve equal, or even better, outcomes.

Minimizing Travel

Leveraging telemedicine immediately after surgical discharge can eliminate the major physical burden of returning for follow-up visits 24-48 hours following a procedure. This can also reduce a patient’s dependence on family members or caregivers for transportation.

In the days and weeks that follow a procedure, patients and their physicians can touch base virtually to determine if an in-person appointment is needed. Even in a specialty like urology, caregivers can follow up on kidney, bladder, or prostate care virtually, discussing test results, pain level, incision site healing, and other questions or concerns the patient may have.

Supporting Better Outcomes

Enabling patients to return home sooner is about more than just convenience. Since surgery can temporarily suppress a patients’ immune response, limiting travel back and forth between the home and the clinical setting reduces the risk of infection, especially for elderly or immunocompromised patients.

When it comes to older adults, in particular, longer hospital stays after surgery can lead to worse outcomes, causing social isolation, confusion, and, as previously mentioned, increased risk of infection. At home, patients often recover equally well, if not better — even if they live alone.

A study from Bringham and Women’s Hospital in Boston even found that patients who received home hospital care, including telemedicine visits, experienced a nearly 70 percent reduction in readmissions within 30 days post-discharge. This, in combination with the rise of minimally-invasive urological procedures, has done a great deal in reducing the length of inpatient stays for acute urological care at hospitals around the country.

Reducing Costs

Telemedicine in post-operative care is also associated with reduced healthcare costs for patients and providers. Patients save precious time and money that they would have spent traveling or paying for the higher out-of-pocket costs for office visits that are charged by some insurers.

As urologists continue to experience declining reimbursement in the growing Medicare population, leveraging telehealth for post-op follow-up care as a supplement to traditional office visits may help maintain practice health and reduce the cost of patient care. Additionally, as the shift to value-based care continues, higher patient satisfaction and the potential for better patient outcomes could also lead to better performance for urologists who leverage telemedicine.

In urology and beyond, post-operative telemedicine can have enormous physical and operational benefits for both patients and physicians. Whether or not we continue to see a widespread proliferation of telemedicine throughout the entire care continuum, there remain many specific areas of utility that should continue to be leveraged.

   

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