Page 44 - Delaware Medical Journal - March/April 2021

Doctors Share
TELEMEDICINE LESSONS LEARNED During Pandemic
Tina Irgang Leaderman
W last spring, physicians across Delaware were faced with the sudden need to mount a telemedicine option so they could continue to see patients who were afraid to leave their homes.
The learning curve was steep for some practices and patients. “We were not using telemedicine before [the pandemic],”
says Angela M. Saldarriaga, MD, a family practice physician
in Wilmington. “I started to review different possibilities of software to do telemedicine, but I really found it very challenging and expensive.”
Many of Saldarriaga’s patients also were hesitant to use an unfamiliar platform.
For other practices, the sudden need to pivot to telemedicine provided a long-awaited opportunity. “We’d been trying to adopt it for the last 10 years in sporadic spurts,” says Robert J. Varipapa, MD, a neurologist in Dover. “Because the insurance companies started covering telemedicine more universally and a lot of companies were coming out of the woodwork supporting it, we
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Del Med J | March/April 2021 | Vol. 93 | No. 2