Dr Emeline Aviki: Telehealth Allows Patients a Quick Return to Daily Life

In an interview at our September Institute for Value-Based Medicine^® event in New York City, Emeline Aviki, MD, MBA, FACOG, assistant attending gynecologic cancer surgeon at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in New York City and lead of the MSKCC Affordability Working Group, discussed how benefits of telehealth in oncologic care extend to other specialty care for patients.

Transcript

What role does telehealth play in oncology care?

Telehealth has a major role in cancer care. I think the COVID-19 pandemic showed us how valuable telehealth can be, not only for patient convenience, but also to make sure that patients are compliant with follow-up. Telehealth can offer a lot of convenience for patients.

If you have a follow-up visit with a patient where they don't need a physical exam and they can get their labs at a time that's convenient for them, that's the perfect opportunity to not force them to have to pay for parking [and] take a day off work. Just take a break during work, do your visit with your oncologist, and get back to life.

In addition to offering patients convenient oncology visits, it also offers the ability to scale nononcologic visits that are very helpful for patients; for example, psychiatric care, supportive care for pain management. It would allow you to get those services that are really in shortage to patients no matter where they are.