S3400 Recurrent Episodes of Diverticulitis in a Young 28-Year-Old Male: A Rising Trend

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Given the current COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing rules have limited in person socialization. Physicians from a variety of specialities, including primary care, endocrinology, rheumatology and more recently gastroenterology, have turned to telemedicine to provide medical care for their patients that can no longer physically visit the hospital due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Telemedicine is defined as providing medical care through a two-way communication between the physician and the patient at a distant site with both audio and video equipment. Although telemedicine has established popularity with most specialities, it has not been fully adopted within the gastroenterology field. We discuss the new era of telemedicine as it pertains to gastroenterology and other aspects of telemedicine such as platform designs, legal, billing and possible challenges in the near future. METHODS: We performed an extensive literature search on currently published data with regards to telemedicine and in particular telemedicine in the field of GI. RESULTS: Below, in Figure 1, we summarize our findings from our literature search with regards to telemedicine platform design, access, legal considerations and billing. CONCLUSION: Providing medical care through telemedicine has significant advantages. Patients describe increased convenience, easier access to medical care, reduced travel burden, improved treatment compliance and outcomes. To date, there has been caution using telemedicine due to expressed concerns regarding strict legislation concerning privacy, platform access, legal ramifications and billing/reimbursement. Due to the COVID-19, legislation has been relaxed in favor of providing more telemedicine visits to patients, in order to encourage safe social distancing and making unnecessary trips to the hospital. In our hospital outpatient clinic setting, telemedicine quickly became popular within the physician staff and patients. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and to enforce safe social distancing precautions, many patients in our gastroenterology and hepatology outpatient clinics were advised not to come into the clinic. After proper training, our physicians started using telemedicine (either through a webcam on the office computer or by using a smartphone). Given its popularity, many of our gastroenterologists are providing telemedicine visits through their smartphone in between prep time for inpatient endoscopy procedures.Figure 1.: Topics in TelemedicineFigure 2.: Billing in TelemedicineFigure 3.: Telemedicine.