Smartphone-based telemedicine service at palliative care unit during nationwide lockdown: Our initial experience at a tertiary care cancer hospital
Sushma Bhatnagar, Swagata Biswàs, ShreyaDas Adhikari, Nishkarsh Gupta, Rakesh Garg, SachidanandJee Bharti, Vinod Kumar, Seema Mishra
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND AIMS: With the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown, and fear from contagion, the advantages of telemedicine are clearly outweighing the setbacks by minimizing the need for individuals to visit health-care facilities. Our study aims to assess how palliative medicine physicians could follow up on cancer patients and barriers they faced, discuss their results, and evaluate their treatment response with the help of telemedicine. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We conducted a prospective analysis of the smartphone-based telemedicine service at our palliative care (PC) unit from March 25, 2020, to May 13, 2020. We recorded the patient's reason for call, main barriers to a hospital visit, and the assistance given to them by the physician on call. Each caller was asked to measure his/her satisfaction with the service on a 4-point scale. RESULTS: = 22) were main modes of management. Fifty-six patients were very satisfied and 152 patients were satisfied with the service. CONCLUSION: Telemedicine is the future of health-care delivery systems. In PC, we deal with immunocompromised debilitated cancer patients and telemedicine is immensely helpful for us to provide holistic integrated care to these patients who are unable to visit hospitals regularly.