MAY 2020 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 29
DIAGNOSIS Telehealth is the wave of the future, medical experts say. (Getty Images)
TELEHEALTH
THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE FOR HEALTHCARE
BY MICHELLE GABRIELLE CENTAMORE
As the coronavirus pandemic created the need for doctors to see their patients without
potentially contracting or spreading COVID-19 during office visits, many are increasingly
turning to telehealth — like Skype, but for healthcare — which provides care remotely through
telecommunications technology.
Telemedicine services enable practitioners to collaborate with each other and their patients
— for example, transfer and analyze data and images — to treat and monitor patients without
physical contact. The technology has been crucial in not only being able to address the
needs of the sick but to protect the healthy, too.
“Clearly at a time when you have a large influx of patients with potential for infectious
disease, putting them all in a waiting room is suboptimal,” says Dr. Josh Kugler, who chairs
the Department of Emergency Medicine at Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital in Oceanside.
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