MOUNT VERNON – There is one development from the COVID-19 pandemic that Dr. Frederick Carroll, an internal medicine physician at Knox Community Hospital, hopes will remain permanent.
That development is telemedicine, which allows patients to communicate with their health care providers by video conferences.
“In response to the pandemic, there was a huge shift to telemedicine,” Carroll told the Mount Vernon News. “We are continuing to offer the service, even though most of the regular service lines are back open.”
Fear of exposure to COVID-19 made some people reluctant to seek treatment, Carroll said.
“I sat in a meeting about a month ago where we discussed the startling statistic that amputations in Knox County were up about 75% over the last year,” he said. “We think part of the reason behind that is in part patients were delaying getting care because they didn’t want to wear masks or they didn’t want to be exposed to COVID-19.”
Telemedicine offers a partial alternative to receiving no care at all.
“The needs can still be addressed instead of pushing things off until the patient is facing a major crisis,” Carroll said.
There are things that telemedicine can’t access, the doctor noted. For serious problems, physicians still need to see the patient in person.
“But for routine care, for routine followup, telehealth is a perfectly acceptable option,” he said.
It is also convenient for patients who can’t always get time off work for in-person doctor’s appointments.
“Why didn’t the insurance industry and Medicare do this for years and years in the past?” Carroll mused. “It makes so much sense to have a service line available, especially now with the capabilities that we have. Video face-to-face visits make so much sense.”
Whether telemedicine survives the expansion will be up to Medicare.
“Medicare pretty much sets the standards,” he said. “Most insurance companies follow the rules that Medicare sets.”
Carroll said that Medicare has been taking telemedicine “year by year.”
“When we first started telemedicine last spring, it was unclear if it would go past Dec. 31,” he said. “In the fall, they announced that they were going to extend it to 2021. We presume it will be available in 2022. We just take it year to year. We just don’t know.”
