Family and community doctors, “with telemedicine easier to follow patients”

(beraking latest news Salute) – “Family doctors were the first to face the pandemic with their bare hands. Initially we didn’t have any safety devices, they were not provided to us. Much has changed since then. Today we have new tools available to help us in our clinical practice. One of the most important is telemedicine, thanks to which we can follow all our patients, in a capillary way. A great advantage, not only for us doctors. It is a new tool and like all novelties it has benefits and certainly limits, which will be studied over time. Although the medical examination in the presence will hardly be replaced by telemedicine, certainly a technological approach helps us to integrate the medical examination and to follow the patient at home more frequently “. Nunzia Pia Placentino, president of the Scientific Medicine Society, told beraking latest news Salute. of family and community, one of the six female presidents of the medical and scientific societies affiliated with the IMF, received this morning at Palazzo Giustiniani by the president of the Senate Casellati, a few days after the National Day for Women’s Health.

“Despite the pandemic – continues Placentino – we have tried to carry on the daily clinical activity, not to leave our patients alone. Surely, in recent months the situation has changed. First of all, we have moved on from close observation and from the classic administration of paracetamol for the control of fever to a different awareness regarding the pharmacological treatment of the disease. We have guidelines to follow, as regards home treatment and in this we are helped by the special units of continuity of care, in the regions where the active service . In this way we try to manage the Covid positive patient at home. I would like to say that in Italy more than 90% of Covid-19 positive patients have been treated at home, this means that the hospitalization rate has been relatively low . This is a great success for us family doctors and for the whole territorial assistance network “.

Not only home care and telemedicine, the latter promoted by 51% of general practitioners (according to data from the Digital Innovation Observatory in Healthcare School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano). In the clinics of family doctors it will also be possible to perform diagnostic tests (such as ultrasound, spirometry, electrocardiogram), which until now were carried out in the hospital.

“It is a first step – affirms Placentino – which will lead in the future to entrust family doctors with the task of carrying out clinical tests and laboratory tests. We are absolutely in favor but we have the problem of excessive bureaucratic burden which weighs 90% on our clinical activity. Being able to carry out these clinical tests in our studies would also, and above all, allow us to limit the sending of our patients to hospitals, also because they are the first to ask us to be followed up as much as possible at home. Therefore, the possibility of carrying out clinical tests in outpatient clinics is welcome as long as they put us in a position to work without the burden of bureaucracy “.