Patients Are Considering Whether They Really Need to Visit a Healthcare Facility; Could This Be Telemedicine’s Moment?

It’s typical at some point during the flu season for hospitals to re-emphasize that patients should consider going to an urgent care center if they have symptoms of influenza, reserving the ED for truly emergent cases. The COVID-19 pandemic is taking that dynamic to a whole new level, as urgent care centers themselves are wrestling with ways to provide care without inviting in highly contagious people. This begs the question, is this crisis telemedicine’s time to shine? UCHealth, for one, seems to think there’s a good chance it could be as they’ve started pushing out press releases extolling the virtues of their virtual urgent care services, referencing the panic of COVID-19 directly. JUCM News readers know that for all its perceived conveniences and potential cost savings, virtual healthcare has simply not gotten any traction in the urgent care marketplace. Now, however, there seems to be more incentive for both patients and operators to keep foot traffic down while keeping patients “in house.” It’s a question for another day to be sure, but the secondary effect could become, then, what if patients really like telemedicine?