Care, Convenience, Comfort, Confidentiality, and Contagion: The 5 C's that Will Shape the Future of Telemedicine

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven rapid, widespread adoption of telemedicine. The distribution of clinicians, long travel distances, and disability all limit access to care, especially for persons with Parkinson's disease. Telemedicine is not a panacea for all of these challenges but does offer advantages. These advantages can be summarized as the 5 C's: accessible care, increased convenience, enhanced comfort, greater confidentiality to patients and families, and now reduced risk of contagion. Telemedicine also has its limitations, including the inability to perform parts of the physical examination and inequitable access to the Internet and related technologies. Future models will deliver care to patients from a diverse set of specialties. These will include mental health specialists, physiotherapists, neurosurgeons, speech-language therapists, dieticians, social workers, and exercise coaches. Along with these new care models, digital therapeutics, defined as treatments delivered through software programs, are emerging. Telemedicine is now being introduced as a bridge to restart clinical trials and will increasingly become a normal part of future research studies. From this pandemic will be a wealth of new telemedicine approaches which will fundamentally change and improve care as well as research for individuals with Parkinson's disease.

Keywords: COVID-19; Parkinson disease; confidentiality; health care reform; organizational innovation; patient comfort; quarantine; telemedicine.