My experience with telehealth is that it still needs a lot of work to make more ideal. But getting better. Inpatient would be much easier to use routinely.
I've used telemedicine during inpatient on occasion and it can be hit or miss. Usually requires a nurse or someone to be available to carry around a device. Which they don't like to do. Constant need to adjust camera angles. I miss enough on physical exam that I don't like it and hard to diagnosis some disorders. Also, a lot of patients don't like seeing their doctor on a TV screen and also don't remember that they were seen by a doctor. If I had a flashy robot that I could drive around it would be a lot better.
When I did outpatient telemedicine over the last 2-3 years, for me, has been less than ideal. Mostly due to technical issues with patients and staff (lack of reliable internet service, mispositioning of camera by patient, staff not knowing what they are doing, buffering, etc). Really disliked doing it outpatient as I would have to spend much more time per encounter and often I didn't feel like I got anything out of it. Too often it would take over 20-40 minutes to get a patient connected from the start of their appt time. But I was in a rural area and most of my patients did not have internet or a reliable phone service. How am i supposed to evaluate someones leg pain when all i get is a buffered, overly-zoomed and blurry image of their face and they are unable to move the camera?
I think the ideal situation would be using telemedicine inpatient as a consultant only, and having a robot or something of high quality that can interact effectively with a wide variety of patients and age groups successfully.
