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Other at-home devices and services currently
being used in the U.S. allow patients to measure doz-
ens of health metrics like temperature, blood pres-
sure and blood sugar several times a day, and the
results are automatically stored on the cloud, from
which doctors get alerts if the readings are abnormal.
Telemedicine also serves as a powerful commu-
nication tool for keeping hundreds of thousands of
people in a specific region up to date with the latest
advice about the risk in their communities and how
best to protect themselves. That can go a long way
toward reassuring people and preventing panic and
runs on health centers and hospitals.
Beyond individual-level care, the data gathered
by telemedicine services can be mined to predict the
broader ebb and flow of an epidemic’s trajectory in
a population. In the U.S., Kaiser Permanente’s tele-
medicine call centers are now also serving as a bell-
wether for an anticipated surge in demand for health
services. Dr. Stephen Parodi, national infectious-
disease leader at Kaiser Permanente, was inspired
by a Google project from a few years ago in which the
company created an algorithm of users’ flu- related
search terms to determine where clusters of cases
were mounting. Parodi started tracking coronavirus-
related calls from the health system’s 4.5 million
members in Northern California in February. “We
went from 200 calls a day to 3,500 calls a day about
symptoms of COVID-19, which was an early indica-
tor of community- based transmission,” he says. “Our
call volume was telling us several weeks before the
country would have all of its testing online that we
have got to plan for a surge in cases.”
On the basis of the swell in calls nationwide, the
hospital system is considering suspending elec-
tive surgeries based on local circumstances, in part
to ensure that ventilators and other critical equip-
ment would be available for an anticipated influx
of COVID-19 patients with severe symptoms. Kai-
ser doctors also postponed appointments for rou-
tine mammograms and other cancer- screening tests
and cut back on in-person appointments by turning
most noncritical visits into virtual visits.
The COVID-19 pandemic may be the trial by fire
that telemedicine finally needs to prove its worth,
especially in the U.S. Despite the fact that apps and
technology for virtual health visits have existed for
several decades, uptake in the country has been slow.
Medicare only recently began reimbursing for tele-
medicine visits at rates comparable to in-person visits,
and states have just begun to relax licensing regula-
tions that prevent doctors in one state from remotely
^
A woman consults a
nurse at a walk-up
COVID-19 testing
booth outside Yangji
Hospital in Seoul
ED JONES—AFP/GETTY IMAGES
