Marisa McGinley, DO, explains how technology can help improve access to multiple sclerosis (MS) care.
Marisa McGinley, DO, assistant professor of neurology at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, explains how technology can help improve access to multiple sclerosis (MS) care.
She presented on the topic during the session, "MS Across Populations and Access to Care" on February 29 at Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in MS (ACTRIMS) Forum 2024.
Transcript
How can technology help to improve MS care access?
Technology definitely has a lot of potential, and I think the most obvious potential is decreasing that geographic barrier. So, as we're talking about for rural communities, in particular, they live a far distance. It's not necessarily reasonable to think that a patient's going to spend 2 days traveling, taking a day off, maybe spending a night.
So technology, specifically teleneurology, really helps decrease that barrier. You can have your 30-minute visit, and the patient can do that even on a lunch break, which decreases the burden of having to take time off work, travel expenses.
I think that technology really has that advantage, but in addition to geographic barriers, it's also just the fact that a lot of our MS patients are working, they have family obligations, and taking time to get to a health care professional, in general, can be quite difficult. I think that technology maybe is one of the only good things that came out of the pandemic; patients became more comfortable, providers became more comfortable with that context, so I think it helps integrate that into a health care model to decrease a lot of those barriers of getting to a physical office location.
There are other technologies, I think, that are going to be coming that help us monitor neurologic function outside of the office environment, too, because I think another frustrating thing for clinicians and also patients is an office visit is very much a snapshot. I think, as we develop technologies that integrate with the medical system, that patients can provide more patient-reported outcomes and things that are happening to them during their daily lives, that we can get more data on how things are going during their day as opposed to just that one-time office visit.
I think technology has a great opportunity to decrease barriers and help us really understand how the disease is impacting our patients' daily life experience.
Dr Kathy Zackowski Discusses the Importance of Rehabilitation Research and Trials in MS
April 26th 2024Kathy Zackowski, PhD, National MS Society, expresses the inherent value of quality rehabilitation trials for broadening clinical understandings of multiple sclerosis (MS) and bettering patient outcomes.
Read More
Examining Low-Value Cancer Care Trends Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
April 25th 2024On this episode of Managed Care Cast, we're talking with the authors of a study published in the April 2024 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care® about their findings on the rates of low-value cancer care services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Listen
Empowering Community Health Through Wellness and Faith
April 23rd 2024To help celebrate and recognize National Minority Health Month, we are bringing you a special month-long podcast series with our Strategic Alliance Partner, UPMC Health Plan. In the third episode, Camille Clarke-Smith, EdD, MS, CHES, CPT, discusses approaching community health holistically through spiritual and community engagement.
Listen
Kaiser Permanente was hit by a data breach in mid-April, impacting 13.4 million health plan members; GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) sued Pfizer and BioNTech for allegedly infringing on its messenger RNA technology patents in the companies’ COVID-19 vaccines; the CDC announced the first-known HIV cases transmitted via cosmetic injections.
Read More