Welcoming Healthcare Into Our Virtual Meeting Rooms: Perspective and Perseverance in Pediatric Rheumatology.

Abstract

Purpose of review: We highlight practice changes adopted to increased use of telemedicine, look at precision, and accuracy in using a virtual visit to evaluate and treat rheumatic disease, and describe our shift in engaging patients and their families in supporting our research aims.

Recent findings: Telemedicine visits increased substantially with the start of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. With this change came the need for significant advances to our telemedicine practices to allow for quality patient visits and continued research collection.

Summary: Telemedicine will continue to be an area of increasing importance and has been found to be especially useful for regions like ours which cover many patients in remote areas across Washington, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. Through the development of new techniques and the use of new technologies, we have been able to improve both the visit quality for patients and our ability to collect research data.