At eHealth22 in June, André Picard, Globe & Mail’s health columnist interviewed Teladoc Health’s Joby McKenzie, PhD., Managing Director in Canada, and Dan Trencher, SVP, Corporate Strategy for a session titled “Virtual Care IS Care”. Teladoc Health is one of the largest and oldest global virtual healthcare companies. The following is an excerpt from their conversation.

André:

Joby, you have a personal experience with the health system and some frustrations, which have led you to reimagine the delivery of healthcare. Can you tell us how an integrated, interconnected system could have changed your family’s experience?

Joby:

My son Calvin was diagnosed with leukemia in 2017 at five years old, and he had chemotherapy every day for three and a half years. He spent about 20 percent of his life in hospital and missed half of his school from kindergarten to grade three. First and foremost, he is two years post his treatment and a thriving ten-year-old. My first observation is that every appointment happened in person, and Calvin missed school and we missed work.  Secondly, every time he had a fever, we had to go into the ER. He had a VIP pass at the hospital, it’s a pass nobody wants, and with that pass it still took us five hours to get assessed and discharged. Those doctors and nurses were working so hard, yet I’m left wondering if there would have been other ways to work with those clinicians. Thirdly, I carried around a three-inch binder for years that had his labs, prescriptions, consultation notes and I always think about data and how important that is to help people live healthy. Point four, his GP called me often to check in to see how he was doing because the data didn’t flow from the hospital to the pediatrician, and lastly, through that journey, both Calvin and his two siblings and my husband and I required mental health support which was hard to find and make time for.

Click here for more of their conversation.

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