July 16, 2018 – Expanding Telemedicine

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Anchor lead: Remote visits to doctors may soon be coming to you, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Telemedicine may soon get a big boost with proposed funding changes by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Redonda Miller, president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, says treatment for things like stroke could be much improved with telemedicine implementation.

Miller: Some of the therapies for stroke are highly technical and involve catheters into arteries in the brain, removing blood clots, so it’s very important for us to have specialized centers of excellence. If you are a patient at a community hospital, and you may be having a stroke, right there the doctors in the ED can conference in via telehealth, the experts at an academic medical center like Hopkins, make the diagnosis, confirm whether the patient needs transfer, get the patient immediately up here for whatever invasive procedure they may need that saves lives.  :33

Miller notes that technology has enabled real time consults almost instantly in emergent situations like stroke, and that many more routine matters also lend themselves to telemedicine visits. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.