How patient-centric is today’s virtual care?

Remote consultations are set to become more mainstream post-Covid-19. Doctors are willing to adopt virtual care, but patients need our support to make the most out of it.

Author: Álvaro Sánchez, Innovation Manager at A Piece of Pie

During these uncertain times, at A Piece of Pie we remain committed to bringing you real-life insights to improve the overall quality of care and achieve better patient outcomes. Doctors, payers and patients around the world have donated us part of their time and we‘re sharing with you their impressions on how the current crisis is changing everything.

Insights from:
200+ Health Care Professionals in the US, Europe and Latin America, and
100+ Patients in the US, Europe and Latin America

According to a recent survey*, 85% of physicians are now seeing more than half of their patients via video or telephone for their routine check-ups and follow-up visits. Surely, virtual care has been hugely helpful to cope with the decline in the volume of patients visits (81% in the US and 50% in Western Europe), especially among Dermatologists, Cardiologists and Rheumatologists. But the question is, will this be just a transitory change?

“[With telemedicine] we have evolved more in 3 months than in the last 10 years.” -Cardiologist, Germany

It’s still hard to say. Doctors tell us that they will be able to provide an answer in or around June but as of now it seems that virtual care is taking hold. Even though nearly half of doctors in the survey (47%) acknowledge that this is the first time they have done remote consultations, 68% believe that it will have a lasting impact on how they see their patients. They have realized that telemedicine can help them reduce the workload and, overall, they report positive experiences with it. Only a relatively small share of doctors from the survey, 28%, believe that seeing patients in person is far more important. But what about patients? How do they feel about this?

“This is an opportunity we should not let go. Most of my work is very repetitive, follow-up visits with chronic patients mainly. We could really reduce that workload.”
-Cardiologist, Germany

Patients, all of us, have conflicting feelings. Since we are still at the height of the outbreak, those who are immunocompromised or belong to risk groups, feel obviously relieved by not having to leave their haven. But what we also gather is that they feel abandoned and helpless. They do not feel the priority right now.

“In the last weeks, I felt abandoned.”
-COPD patient, Spain

“It’s not the same. If I was there, the doctor would examine me to check whether everything was ok. She can’t do that on the phone.”
-Cancer patient, Spain

Also, the disruption we live in now has exposed the shortcomings of the usual channels for communicating with their doctors. Many among them need reassurance and feeling cared for but, mind you, their anxiety also reflects limitations of telephone and video calls for effective consultations. Valuable information such as doctors’ facial expressions might be lost or, worse, misunderstood. Instead of an opportunity for self-reflection, silences become awkward moments to be skipped. More importantly, patients consistently report feeling more nervous and insecure over the phone, as they find it difficult to report certain symptoms or treatment side effects. They also struggle to understand doctor recommendations or to remember when their next visit will be.

Even if we still need to wait for the dust to settle before we can ascertain the long-lasting impact of the outbreak on your customers’ practices, what we gather from them is that telemedicine has arrived to stay. Patients are less aware about the long-term consequences, but it appears they need to better engage and communicate with their doctors.

“Many patients aren’t used to talk with doctors on the phone. They get nervous and forget to report symptoms. Then they call me and ask what to do and I tell them that they should call the doctor again, but they feel embarassed. They don’t want to be a nuissance.”
-Oncology nurse, Spain

We have identified two areas to enhance virtual care:

1. Techniques for doctors to reassure patients about the quality of the care they receive. These can range from developing soft skills to build trust in virtual conversations to tips and messages for planning and executing the conversations.
2. Disease-specific tools for patients to support their interactions with doctors by enabling them to monitor, organize and share relevant information for the consultations (e.g. symptoms and side effects, medicine intake and diet, questions and concerns). Ultimately, these tools will demand patients to get more involved in disease self-management and therefore should take into account the different degrees of willingness among patients as well as their digital readiness.

*Sermo’s April HCP Sentiment Survey with 1300+ physicians across specialties.

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