Future of Health Care 2020

Patient Care
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BEYOND THE PANDEMIC
“A lot of decisions have to be made, and
hopefully we’re getting it right,” says Dr. Leslie
Bisson, president of UBMD Orthopaedics &
Sports Medicine, who is now seeing about half
of his patients via telehealth.
JOED VIERA
HEALTH CARE HAS EVOLVED QUICKLY SO WHICH CHANGES WILL STICK AROUND?
BY TRACEY DRURY tdrury@bizjournals.com 716-541-1609, @BfloBizTDrury
Patients on a
doctor visit via
their smartphone
or Zoom should
get used to that
method because
telehealth and
other new
business models
are likely to
remain.
Health-care providers are finding that
some pandemic solutions are easier and
more readily acceptable than expected.
And that’s after 50 years of dabbling.
Ask Dr. Thomas Hughes, chief medical
officer of Optimum Physician Alliance
and Great Lakes Integrated Network,
which includes Kaleida Health and Erie
County Medical Center Corp.
Hughes points to a book called “Five
Patients” by Michael Crichton, a physician
in Boston before becoming a
best-selling author.
Crichton wrote about his experiences
as a resident and about a telehealth
program in the early 1960s at Logan Airport
for patients arriving on international
flights who needed treatment.
“Teletechnology has been around for
a long time,” Hughes said. “This is something
people have been talking about for
a long time, dreaming about, but for a
complicated set of reasons, it’s never taken
off.”
Part of the delay was payers, he said,
who didn’t like the idea, and physicians
who weren’t sure exactly what
to do. Now telehealth is being used for
almost everything, including orthopedics,
non-urgent emergency care, dermatology,
mental health, sleep medicine
and even dentistry.
Today, 100 percent of Optimum’s network
practices offer telehealth in some
form, including the smallest practices
with the oldest practitioners.
“All of a sudden, Covid comes up, and
we had an adequate ability to test it,”
Hughes said. “I’m a physician, and I have
an obligation to take care of my patients.
But I also have an obligation to take of my
staff. So how can I provide excellent care
in a safe setting where I’m protecting my
SEE PRIMARY­CARE, PAGE 6
MAY 15, 2020 THE FUTURE OF HEALTH CARE 5