The evolving post-pandemic healthcare landscape, including telemedicine, and holistic care are trends Niranjan Kavadi, MD, is observing. Dr. Kavadi, a spine surgeon in Oklahoma City, spoke on the "Becker's Healthcare Spine and Orthopedic Podcast" about why those topics are top of mind.
This is an excerpt. Listen to the full episode here.
Question: What are the three top trends that you're following right now?
Dr. Niranjan Kavadi: What I'm looking forward to is the post-pandemic preparedness. We all know our personal lives, our professional lives and most importantly the patient care that we offer has been disrupted to a great extent. There have been so many delays, and the pandemic has kept us apart because of social distancing and because of several other issues as well. So I'm following that very closely. What's gonna happen in the future? When do we come back to so-called "normalcy"? When do we start getting back to normal practice? I'm specifically looking at the virtual care options and telehealth. Going forward, this is going to be the main part of our practice. I think it's a great avenue. Of course not everyone will qualify for virtual care, but if we screen patients appropriately, it's a great tool. That's something I see from the cost-saving perspective as well. In-person visits do have their own advantages, but if you can save all of that travel and with the social distancing issues, the virtual care is a very good option.
That gets me into my next point, healthcare spending is another thing that I follow. Based on the healthcare analytics, we know there's more and more data coming out, and we definitely want to reduce the waste and do the lead processing and see what's good and what's not good and where you can best utilize the healthcare practices to offer the high quality and value-based patient care so that we can still keep offering the care, but bring spending down.
As surgeons over time as we're practicing, we tend to get tunnel vision. Whenever we are treating patients, we always look at them from a surgical perspective. I love surgery, but what I also love is the holistic approach that is developing to address the back and neck pain or the overall pain issues that we deal with the patients. Here at Oklahoma City VA, we have developed a program where we have a collaborative meeting of all the surgeons, the neurologists, the pain management physicians and several mental health providers as well. We have incorporated cognitive behavioral therapies, some mental health programs to help the veterans with their overall pain management. So I'm definitely following that trend as well. And I think multidisciplinary collaboration is definitely going to be useful for our patients.