To help mitigate the problem, most healthcare organizations have integrated telehealth into their care delivery models, but Kurliand says traditional telehealth methods have limitations. Learn what they are and how MedWand, a new modern technology, is revolutionizing telehealth visits with unique features that allow healthcare providers to conduct comprehensive virtual exams that were impossible to do before.
What is missing from traditional telehealth?
Remote visits require clinicians to rely on the patient’s medical history and self-reported symptoms, but they want more. They want to hear the heart and lung sounds and get the patient’s temperature. Until now, they kept asking if they could get more of these vitals. The answer was no, not if you’re doing a straight-up audio video.
How does MedWand address limitations?
MedWand is a handheld tool that measures temperature, blood oxygen, and pulse rate. It also
operates like a stethoscope, capturing heart, lung, and abdominal auscultations. The high-definition camera can examine ear canal, throat, and skin conditions while transmitting real-time data to a tablet or computer. This allows for more comprehensive virtual exams from a patient’s home or any location. Clinicians who use MedWand tell us outcomes are improving and that more patients have access to care.
When you say MedWand lets clinicians perform comprehensive home exams, one of ECRI’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns of 2024 comes to mind: diagnostic errors and delayed diagnoses. Could MedWand help?
Absolutely. I’ve had many discussions about why this happens. Many factors could be at play, such as staff shortages, clinician burnout and fatigue, poor documentation, noise, disruptions, and lack of access to necessary diagnostic tools. That and more can potentially contribute to errors and missed diagnoses.
For example, pneumonia is one of the top five diseases that go undiagnosed or have a delayed diagnosis. It also puts more than a million people in the hospital and causes over 50,000 deaths annually. One of the things physicians say about telemedicine visits is that patients will mention difficulty breathing, feeling a little lightheaded, or other ambiguous symptoms. Still, they can’t tell if someone has a cold or something more serious.
With MedWand, you can hear if there are any crackles, rails, wheezing, or minimal sounds going through a particular lobe. If you’re doing a video visit without auscultating the lungs, you can miss many things because the number one determining factor is whether the breathing mechanics sound smooth and fluid. If they don’t, get your patient in for imaging or additional workups. On the other hand, if the lungs sound OK, you can avoid unnecessary tests and expenses. MedWand provides the auscultations and captures all the data in real time.
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