Telemedicine Arrives in the U.K.: ‘10 Years of Change in One Week’

In a matter of days, a revolution in telemedicine has arrived at the doorsteps of primary care doctors in Europe and the United States.

The virtual visits, at first a matter of safety, are now a centerpiece of family doctors’ plans to treat the everyday illnesses and undetected problems that they warn could end up costing additional lives if people do not receive prompt care.

In Europe, virtual medicine has been held back by strict privacy regulations and patients reluctant to give up in-person doctor’s visits.

British primary care doctors, too, have been barraged by growing workloads of late, with patients living longer and more problems being rerouted from hospitals, leaving them little time to train on virtual tools.

Neighborhood doctors, many of them once skeptics, are rushing into the new age, too, singing the praises of virtual visits that they say save them time and offer a useful complement to physical exams.

Desperate as health systems are to keep coronavirus patients out of general practitioners’ offices, British doctors say the dams have broken.

The telephone system for triaging virus patients is overwhelmed, leaving people pleading with their family doctors for help.

In some large primary care practices in London, doctors are setting up so-called dirty zones where they examine patients with respiratory symptoms and clean zones for everything else.

Other primary care networks have set up entire clinics, known as “hot tubs,” devoted to possible coronavirus patients who have other pressing health problems.

And as lockdowns in Britain and across the rest of Europe continue and older people are advised to stay home, doctors see virtual visits as the only way of caring for people who can ill afford to lose track of everyday ailments.

Before the virus, video appointments made up only 1 percent of the 340 million or so annual visits to primary care doctors and nurses in Britain’s National Health Service.

Primary care doctors in Britain said they were prescribing more antibiotics, abandoning their usual caution about overuse to avoid in-person appointments.

For more superficial needs, though, doctors said the virtual appointments had put an end to having to wait for patients to arrive and asking them to travel without good reason.

Already a trusted tool for doctors who wanted to send text messages to patients, accuRx built a video-calling system over a weekend after the virus hit Britain

Doctors said patients had seemed to adapt quickly, with the help of occasional coaching in how to open text messages and video links