If you’ve been reading Irreal for more than the last 5 posts you know that I’m a big supporter of remote work. There are many many jobs that can be done remotely and there’s no reason for many employees to be on-site. Still, there are some jobs that intrinsically require an on-site presence. It’s hard, but not impossible, to imagine a store clerk working from home. Some jobs, though, just seem to require an in-person presence.
One such job is medical provider. To be sure, COVID-19 has seen the rise of virtual appointments but sometimes doctors really do need to be able to put their hands on you to do their job.
The other day, I went to one of my doctors for a yearly checkup and when the doctor came into the examining room, he had an iPad with an active video session. He told me that that the woman at the other end was a medical transcriptionist who was based on the other coast of Florida. During the exam, the transcriptionist reminded the doctor of past findings from tests and recorded the current findings.
If the transcriptionist had been in the exam room, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it but the fact that she was far away made the process seem unusual and strange. But that’s just silly. She could see and hear everything that was going on—we even waved goodbye when the exam was over—so was able to capture all the relevant data just as well as someone who was in situ.
There isn’t anything really surprising about all this. It’s just that we don’t often think about medicine as a field ripe for disruption by remote work. It is, however, already happening.