Telehealth's new wartime purpose

Also: The dark, overlooked history of the Forbes House Museum [View in browser](    [❤️]( May 2, 2022 Hello CommonHealth reader, What would make life in a bomb shelter slightly better? According to Milton Chen, one answer is an appointment with your primary care physician. Chen runs the telemedicine company VSee and its nonprofit wing Aimee. In the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he has been in daily touch with the Ukrainian Ministry of Health on a variety of projects. One recent request surprised him, he told me. The ministry wanted to use his telemedicine platform to help Ukrainians reconnect with their physicians. This isn’t because, after two months of war, chronic problems are becoming acute — although that is also likely true. Instead, Chen said, the ministry's goal is to improve people’s mental health by giving them something reminiscent of life before the Russian invasion, something as mundane as routine checkups. “Even though this is a war situation, people want to be normal and can use telemedicine to make things normal,” Chen told me. Telemedicine has been around — in some form or another — for many decades. And while the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly accelerated its adoption, telehealth also gained traction in war settings and natural disasters. Gregory Ciottone, chief of disaster medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, attributes the trend to a huge leap in connectivity, even in the most austere situations. “I would honestly say that, in the world of disaster medicine, telehealth is still kind of evolving,” he said. “We're still trying to figure out best practices and best ways to integrate it into disaster medicine and disaster response.” Ciottone said the war in Ukraine is pushing the envelope in terms of what’s possible. In the classic telehealth scenario, a doctor sees a patient remotely via videoconference. Now, physicians are using telehealth platforms to train people at the scene to do lifesaving procedures with “just-in-time medical education.” Aimee, for example, has been making it possible for a surgeon half-way across the world to live-coach a local doctor though a surgery they’re not as familiar with, aided by high-definition cameras. This remote help has been occurring for procedures like amputations. Another group, Hingham-based Medcase, is volunteering its telemedicine platform to give refugees access to medical experts and specialists while they’re far from a clinic. Medcase is also helping refugees store their medical records on their phones, so they can access them even as they cross international borders. These are just a few of the ways Massachusetts residents are helping Ukrainians via telehealth. Keep an eye out for more of my reporting coming soon with more takeaways. Gabrielle Emanuel Health reporter [Follow]( Support the news  This Week's Must Reads [The Forbes mansion was built with opium money. Now, an exhibit reckons with Boston's lesser known history]( The Forbes’ mansion, now called the Forbes House Museum, was built in 1833 with profits from the China opium trade. Now, for the first time, the museum is focusing on that past with a new exhibit. It's part of a slow reckoning with this dark and lesser-known piece of Boston’s legacy. 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[Read more.]( Outlook readers: We're having some technical difficulties, so if you're having a hard time seeing photos in today's newsletter, please click the "view in browser" link above. Thanks for your patience! What We're Reading 📚 For those following the drawn-out drama around authorizing a COVID vaccine for kids under 5, the past few weeks have been befuddling. There was a promising announcement from Moderna, followed by an FDA official suggesting that perhaps it makes sense to wait on Moderna until Pfizer is ready too, so it’d be [“less confusing”]( for parents. Zeynep Tufekci challenged this reasoning in [a New York Times op-ed]( arguing this move is part of a pattern in which “unwarranted assumptions about human behavior have obstructed an effective response to Covid.” Tufekci reflects on how, early in the pandemic, government officials were reluctant to recommend masks, fearing it would offer a false sense of security. 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