Over just a few weeks, there has been a shift to telemedicine visits, in which patients can talk with their doctors by video, telephone or even email. Those visits seem to be less profitable for doctors, and many health systems had long avoided setting up an infrastructure for them. But the new virtual visits have many advantages: Patients can avoid travel and waiting rooms; caregivers can easily participate; and several doctors can talk to the same patient at once. There are no clipboards full of personal information to fill out by hand, and no person needed to retype the answers into a computer system before such visits.

Source: New York Times May 08, 2020 15:32 UTC