Chiropractic + Naturopathic Doctor • March/April 2022 • From the editor

I recently attended a webinar titled “The reality of virtual care: Learning from the pandemic.” A reflection on the last two years, this was part of Ontario Health’s Provincial Quality and Safety Patient Rounds. Obviously the popularity and usage of virtual care have increased dramatically since the advent of the pandemic – utilized out of necessity and safety, but also out of ease-of-use for some patients.

According to one graph displayed in the presentation, which showed emergency department (ED) visits and percentage overall virtual primary care visits (January 2019-July 2021), there appears to be an inverse association between the percentage of virtual visits in primary care and the number of emergency department visits. With a graph on-screen, the presenter drew our attention to June of 2021, where the rate of virtual care dipped below 50% and at the same time, the total ED visits rose. “So the idea that people didn’t see their patients, and as a result patients went to the ED more often is not held up by...this data. Future analyses might show a more complex relationship, but I wanted to show that basically, virtual care is more than 50% of primary care visits currently, and so it is deeply embedded in our system – and we need to think about how to use it best,” said presenter Dr. Onil Bhattacharyya, a family physician and the Frigon-Blau Chair in Family Medicine Research at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto.

He then posed a question: Is channel management a professional responsibility? This was followed by a quote from a patient who said: “I think it’s more of an ethical obligation on both sides to use the most appropriate channel for the most appropriate situation so that the costliest, most resource-intensive, and most humanistic channels are there for the people who really need it.”

There were surprises and growing pains for adapting and managing virtual care visits at the start. And of course, being in a profession that generally requires us to visit in-person, it’s still true that virtual care and adoption of new technologies is of growing importance, whether that’s for greater access to care, ways to monitor care, education/self-management support, or even for coordination with other providers.

There are still unanswered questions with virtual care and the reality of practice re-design, the resources available, etc., but I encourage you to be earlier adoptors and get ahead of what the future of healthcare looks like.

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