We love our TV doctors: ER, House, Grey’s Anatomy—the appetite for on-air medicine is insatiable. So maybe it’s not too surprising that patients don’t seem to mind seeing their real doctor on TV as well.
In a recent study of 270 patients recovering from urologic surgery, half were seen by their regular doc and half received a high-tech checkup from a "telerounding robot." The five-foot-tall motorized device included a flat-screen monitor and mic. Using a Web link and a high-def camera, docs logged in from wherever (golf course? Vegas?) to check up on their patients.
To glean the wisdom of a specialist in another city or across the ocean, this makes sense. Robots have been used to conduct life-saving remote surgery too. But do you really want your regular doctor looking like something off Lost in Space?
But here’s the thing. Patients didn’t seem to mind the lack of personal touch, or any touch at all. They did just as well health-wise with the virtual visits. In fact, two out of three patients said that if their own doctor was out of town, they would choose to see them onscreen, rather than see another doctor in the flesh.
That makes a certain amounts of sense, but I’m not sure I follow the logic quite as far as one expert does. "The importance of human touch turns out not to be in touch at all; it can be administered by a robot as long as there is a familiar face and mind on the other side," according to a commentary by Jo Buyske, M.D., of the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in Philadelphia, in the December issue of the Archives of Surgery.
There is another possibility, of course: Patients’ regular expectations are now so low already that a visit from I, Robot, MD, can provide the same level of human interaction they’re used to.
Comments (0)