Clinical Center News
Summer 2020

Virtual appointments provide safe platform for telemedicine

Stethoscope on a phone with words that read telemedicine

Let's talk telehealth. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the NIH Clinical Center Health Information Management Department and Department of Clinical Research Informatics have provided a way for care providers to administer telemedicine to patients participating in clinical trials. Using the Microsoft® Teams platform, researchers in the Clinical Center have facilitated more than 2,200 telehealth visits since April 2020 – enabling patients to see their care teams and allowing the research to continue.

Dr. James Gulley, Chief of the Genitourinary Malignancies Branch and Director of the Medical Oncology Service at the National Cancer Institute, and his team were among the first clinical groups in the NIH Clinical Center to pilot the use of Microsoft® Teams as an approved platform for telehealth.

"We had extensive experience using WebEx. ...In early April we had the opportunity to switch over to Teams and use that platform for telehealth. This allowed us to not only keep staff at home and interview patients in the Clinical Center via Teams, but also let us keep patients at home in some cases and interview them via Teams," Gulley said. "We quickly got used to the platform, and it became our preferred means of communication between team members, other collaborators and patients. This has opened up opportunities for us to communicate more effectively with patients at home. Phone conversation can get some of the information however much of communication is nonverbal. This also provides improved efficiency for patients and healthcare providers and decreases costs in both money, time and potential exposure to SARS-CoV2."

Gulley also added, "telehealth/telemedicine is an important area to expand into at the NIH Clinical Center. We are uniquely positioned and not having to bill patients and therefore have none of those constraints. Furthermore, our patients often travel hundreds of miles or more for clinic visits. Select safety checks and follow-up visits could safely and easily be done by telemedicine."

As outlined in the 2019 CC Strategic Report (cc.nih.gov/strategic), the hospital has just begun its journey with telehealth — "if the CC is to be a national resource, it must become a more robust virtual resource." Telehealth will continue to expand at the NIH and offer new opportunities with improved technology. To learn more, visit Telehealth Resources or call 301-496-2292.

- Molly Freimuth

CC Newsletter
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