Chris McCann, co-founder and CEO of Current Health, sat down with Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, to discuss the biggest opportunities he sees for remote care to impact healthcare delivery and drug discovery models, during COVID-19 and beyond.
Chris McCann: The pandemic has exploded utilization and deployment of remote patient monitoring, digital health and virtual care. What do you think will happen after the direct impact of COVID-19 has dissipated? Will the use of remote monitoring continue?
Eric Topol: When I was working on my book The Creative Destruction of Medicine, I had predicted that telemedicine was going to be an important part of the future of care delivery. What I hadn’t predicted is that it would take a global pandemic to bring that about. When distancing mandates were put in place in March 2020, hospitals began to introduce telemedicine and remote monitoring to a degree and speed that we had never envisioned. During this time, we proved that you can accomplish a lot through virtual visits. I think virtual care will only improve as we’re able to include things like sensor data, labs, and imaging into the virtual visit.