Craig Sorkin Speaks on How He Brought His Telehealth Practice to Life

I have been interested in telemedicine and digital health since undergraduate nursing school. While other students were doing their medication math and pathophysiology research in bulky pocket guides, I was using my PalmPilot with great success. Fast-forward to graduate school, where I earned my adult nurse practitioner master’s degree and family nurse practitioner postgraduate degree, and where I wrote several papers and completed presentations on the benefits and future of technology in medicine. My doctoral degree also had several reports and projects focusing on the topic. Never did I imagine how valuable technology would be to myself, my employer, and my patients.

I have been working on bringing telemedicine to my practice since 2015. After many ups and downs, it was finally brought to the front burner because of COVID-19. During this pandemic, years of research, long-winded meetings, and dedication paid off. We, like many other healthcare organizations, were thrust into a completely digital care plan when we had to vacate our brick-and-mortar locations. I was named the clinical lead of telemedicine at my practice and helped bring it to life.

The first day, I was the only provider with one assistant, and we saw 30 patients. The next day, we saw 60 patients with two assistants. By the end of the week, we had four providers and an entire team dedicated to this platform with more than 200 patients served in one day! The next week, as the crisis ramped up, we had more and more patients being seen digitally. After two months of the new normal during COVID-19, we had completed more than 100,000 telemedical visits across all our primary care and specialty care providers.

Patients became responsible for monitoring their own blood pressures and glucose readings. Patients who, under normal circumstances, would be admitted to the hospital without question were being discharged home, some even on oxygen or with bilateral pneumonia. How to manage a patient with mild hypoxemia from home when that patient cannot come to the office for periodic pulse oximetry monitoring? We found a smartphone application that offered pulse and pulse oximetry using their phone’s camera. I have never prescribed more home monitoring equipment than during this period. Patients became their own nurses.

I hope you enjoy this book and are able to take some knowledge that has been hard-earned and battle-tested during one of the worst pandemics this society has ever seen. Digital health and telemedicine are here to stay. What remains to be seen is how far they will advance and how accepted they will become.

-Craig Sorkin