AAP Voices Blog

The changes in medical practice over the past several months have been more than a whirlwind. They have been a tornado at best. Following months of near daily changes to medical practice as we know it, the dust is settling, and we will find ourselves in a very different landscape of medicine.

I work at a Federally Qualified Health Center in Colorado and, like many, I have gone from never doing telehealth to seeing phone visits become the majority of my patient encounters. 

While it was frustrating and disheartening at first, I find myself increasingly accepting of telehealth and find that our patients also are adjusting to the new normal. It certainly helps that as we all become more accustomed to the process, we are better at providing medicine through this new interface. 

And there are small signs of better days on the horizon: our numbers of visits are slowly rising, we are hoping to restart our dental services soon, and children are returning for their well child checks. 

At present, I am physically in the clinic one day a week. My clinic days are extremely busy as I fit in as many well child checks as possible in an effort to get infants and children immunized.  

In those visits I address what we miss in telehealth: the infant who has developmental delays that the parents did not realize were present, the child who is not growing adequately, the teenager who is obese.  

As we continue to rely heavily on telehealth, I worry about the number of children who will forgo a well child check this year, the diagnoses and immunizations that will be missed, or the families who will change to a different medical home to find providers with more availability.

Time will tell. 

I hope that our families stick with us. I hope that soon we can return to the clinic on a full-time basis. I hope that we don’t have a second wave of COVID-19.  

But if we do have a second wave, I know we all will be better prepared for having weathered the first one. 

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*The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of the American Academy of Pediatrics.