When the Covid-19 pandemic broke out, medical services of all kinds were disrupted. One big concern was that people with opioid use disorder would not be able to access the evidence-based standard of care, including opioid replacement therapies such as buprenorphine. Fortunately, the federal government changed its rules when the pandemic shut the country down for a couple of months, expanding telehealth dramatically. Among other things, this allowed patients with opioid use disorders to initiate buprenorphine via telehealth, rather than relapse on heroin or fentanyl and risk a fatal overdose.
Dr. Faust, I am a fan and proponent of tele-med aka tele-health because we live in Western Mass and Partners owns our local rural hospital Cooley Dickinson. Tele-med worked well during the pandemic, but now it is being sporadically disrupted at B&W, MGB and Dana Farber for simple follow-up procedure wellness check-ins. Why? I’ve heard from my docs that they favor it, and rural patients in Western Mass prefer almost anything to avoid the torture of spending gridlock hours on the Mass Pike for the majority of a day so they can spend twenty to thirty minutes of usually interrupted time with their docs in person in Boston. In the medical financial food-chain, who is getting shorted by tele-med and has the political power to cause the disruption of a good program that benefits the docs and their patients? What am I missing? Do the rural docs dislike the fact that rural patients find it easier to avoid waiting months to see a specialist in the rural parts of New England by making the initial trip into Boston, establishing a relationship with a Partners Boston based doc, then continuing care with tele-med, and apparently leaving their local docs feeling abandoned and having fewer patients? This might be an unspoken point of pressure on the pols who regulate tele-med regulations. I suspect this might be one of the reasons why the patient is forced to spend their day in Mass Pike gridlock hell as a form of payback for not remaining loyal to their local docs. Tell me it isn’t so. You want to go to the big city? Prepare to spend an overnight in a Boston hotel in order to be able to not miss the early morning appointment and then worry about a rear-end collision going home. Or, stay local and not step out of the scheduling process. Whose brother-in-law if influential with the Medicare regulators? Paranoid? Nope. Just an older Massachusetts resident who has seen how Mass politics works.
I was under the impression that with the ending of the Emergency orders Medicare (or the FDA I guess) would not allow Telehealth by telephone, which also could be very helpful. Am I mistaken about this and do you not believe that such access would help too.
Dr. Faust, I am a fan and proponent of tele-med aka tele-health because we live in Western Mass and Partners owns our local rural hospital Cooley Dickinson. Tele-med worked well during the pandemic, but now it is being sporadically disrupted at B&W, MGB and Dana Farber for simple follow-up procedure wellness check-ins. Why? I’ve heard from my docs that they favor it, and rural patients in Western Mass prefer almost anything to avoid the torture of spending gridlock hours on the Mass Pike for the majority of a day so they can spend twenty to thirty minutes of usually interrupted time with their docs in person in Boston. In the medical financial food-chain, who is getting shorted by tele-med and has the political power to cause the disruption of a good program that benefits the docs and their patients? What am I missing? Do the rural docs dislike the fact that rural patients find it easier to avoid waiting months to see a specialist in the rural parts of New England by making the initial trip into Boston, establishing a relationship with a Partners Boston based doc, then continuing care with tele-med, and apparently leaving their local docs feeling abandoned and having fewer patients? This might be an unspoken point of pressure on the pols who regulate tele-med regulations. I suspect this might be one of the reasons why the patient is forced to spend their day in Mass Pike gridlock hell as a form of payback for not remaining loyal to their local docs. Tell me it isn’t so. You want to go to the big city? Prepare to spend an overnight in a Boston hotel in order to be able to not miss the early morning appointment and then worry about a rear-end collision going home. Or, stay local and not step out of the scheduling process. Whose brother-in-law if influential with the Medicare regulators? Paranoid? Nope. Just an older Massachusetts resident who has seen how Mass politics works.
I was under the impression that with the ending of the Emergency orders Medicare (or the FDA I guess) would not allow Telehealth by telephone, which also could be very helpful. Am I mistaken about this and do you not believe that such access would help too.