My first telehealth experience
Two days ago my 6yo (7 today, Happy Birthday Maggie!) complained that her ear was hurting. The last time she complained about that was 14 months ago and ended up with a double ear infection which was cured by some eardrops.
She’s been in a kiddie pool a lot lately. I had no doubts she had swimmer’s ear.
We told the nurse over the phone the info, and they had us sit and wait for a text message to join a telehealth session. The message didn’t show, both I and my wife called the office to attempt to get in touch to find out what had happened. Nobody answered.
About half an hour past appointment we got a call from the doctor who said they were waiting. When he called the text message came through and bam, phone visit.
Phone visit was pretty normal, doctor tried to wave us off of antibiotics while offering them as an option (we just wanted the ear drops, worked last time, this was the same thing, no antibiotics requested at the moment,) and ended up prescribing the ear drops after verifying that we had a child who would say her ear hurt.
After the visit we received a second text that was a resend of the first in an attempt to get us in. Text messages were either delayed on the senders part or on the Sprint network. No idea which, but it wasted 30 minutes or so of all of our time.
Not that it would have been any different had we gone in, but in this case SMS was the culprit, not bad scheduling.
Overall, the not having to leave, awesome. I mean, at this point I’m climbing the walls and would like to have gone somewhere, but you know what I mean. Only thing missing for the doctor was an endoscope / good look inside the ear.
Sadly he didn’t ask if I had one, as I do.
Overall, the text messaging was the weakest link. I got a return call from the office shortly afterward and mentioned we’d just finished the session.
