Amit Pohl on Telemedicine's Role in Emergency Care and COVID-19 Impact (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: My name is Amit Pohl. I'm an attending physician at Northwestern Memorial in Chicago. In addition to that, I'm vice president of strategy at Doximity. In the emergency department setting, if I need to quickly consult a colleague or if I have to catch up with a patient after they leave my department, I can do both of those things from my app on my phone, and that incredible convenience and the simplicity on the other side for my colleagues and patients to be able to get that message has proven to be really convenient. Oftentimes, when I'm off shift, if I need to catch up on work or catch up with colleagues, I'll also use the messaging capability. It's particularly helpful in an emergency department setting where I can communicate with providers from other departments and kind of catch them up on happenings with their patients when I'm away from the hospital. In my emergency department with COVID patients, we re-engineered our workflow so only critical physicians were present in a room at any given time. So my staff is taking to using the video functionality in Doximity Dialer to actually communicate from inside of a room with a COVID patient, outside to staff, and often outside to family. I definitely think telemedicine is here to stay. Folks across all specialties, across all corners of the country have learned how to utilize this technology to more efficiently provide care to their patients. I know in my institution at the emergency department, we're actually reconsidering the concept of a waiting room. It's a tall order in emergency medicine to eliminate a waiting room, but we can certainly leverage technologies like telemedicine to rethink how we provide that patient care. COVID has had a tremendous impact on my practice. To begin with, it's just a humbling experience to have to deal with a disease entity that you're not familiar with, and that removes a whole host of kind of your go-to tools. Practicing in that kind of environment, particularly when your patients are critically ill, is very nerve-wracking. Throughout, I think it's also revealed our resilience, both on the provider side as well as the patient side, where we've become a lot more accepting and patient with one another, and we have been able to engineer solutions and discover remedies that can provide folks care. We've learned a lot through the COVID-19 pandemic. I would say most notably, in my experience, the importance of communication. I've learned that communication is not just a singular thing. There are multiple forms of communication that take place in the provision of care to any single patient on any given day, and I've leveraged Doximity technology to improve on all facets of that, frankly. I truly believe in this company's mission. It allows me to use my technical background. It allows me to kind of build things or contribute to building things that will help me, frankly, as a user, as well as my colleagues on the healthcare side.