As we continue the lifestyle of "social distancing", each of us is experiencing our daily lives in our own unique ways. I am not going to speak for anyone else's experience, but I can share my own.
Today, Hubs and I tried something new, and it worked! He was needing to get a renewal on a prescription from our doctor, and in normal times, he would have had to go in to her office and meet with her in person for a check-up before she would have renewed his Rx. Currently, because of the Pandemic, she is not meeting with her patients in person in her office. Instead, she is doing video conferencing.
For a number of years, this medical office has had a Patient Portal for each patient. We each have our own username and password, and once we get into our personal account, we can send messages to the doctor, order refills of Rx, check the lab results for any tests that were run, look at the history of our appointments, etc... It's been quite useful to me over the years. Hubs has never used his much, and in fact, because he hadn't logged onto it in over a year, it had frozen his password. Yesterday, we had to spend some time in phone calls with a staffer at the doc's office getting him back into his Portal. We were told that once he was "in", they would schedule an appointment for him to have a video conference with the doctor. We got the Portal to work yesterday afternoon, and his appt was scheduled for 9 am this morning.
We were told he would need to be prepared to share his height, weight, BP, pulse, and heart rate. We were able to gather all of that info before the appt time. For the appointment, we had to use my school-issued Chromebook because it has a video camera built in. Neither of us have cameras on any of our desktop computers. About 15 minutes before the actual appointment time, we got a phone call from the nurse who would have done a conversation/screening with him in the office before the doc came in. She asked him a lot of questions and made note of all of his vitals. Once she was finished with the phone call, Hubs had to wait a few minutes for the doctor to connect through the video link on the Portal. We were pleasantly surprised that the video link actually WORKED! What a concept! He chatted with our doctor for about 15 min. (I waved to her, too!) It was a successful "virtual office visit", and his Rx needs will be filled now.
This whole experience raised some questions in our minds about this use of technology. Certainly, there are many people in our society who don't have the capability of doing a video conference with anyone, let alone a doctor. I thought about my parents. If they were still alive today, they wouldn't be able to do any computer activity at all. I'm just guessing here, but it seems to me there has to be a significant % of the population, even in Ohio, who could not have done what we did today. So then what? I have no idea what our Doc does to see patients who can't do video conferencing. Maybe she can do phone conversations? I don't know if that suffices. I suppose it is better than nothing.
So, here we are, in a time of crisis, and we are learning new things that can be useful in the future! Go figure! I wonder, once this Pandemic is over, will our Doc still do video conferencing for simple issues like we experienced today? It will be interesting to see how that works.
Thanks for visiting my Blog today! I hope you and yours are well and dealing with all of this in the best way possible!
WASH YOUR HANDS!
:)Amy
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