As we enter another month of government-enforced lockdown, there can’t be many people who haven’t had a catch up or even a pub quiz, on one of the many video calling platforms.
FaceTime, Zoom and even Houseparty have quickly become normal methods for workers and families to keep in contact while working remotely and social distancing.
The technology has also been used by many independent optometrists to triage and remote-consult during the coronavirus lockdown. Indeed, video consultations have this week been rolled out by Specsavers and Locsu’s Cues scheme.
People often refer to ‘things getting back to normal,’ but I can’t help but feel that there won’t be a ‘back to normal’ in the case of telemedicine. The widespread acceptance of video calling is likely to be the catalyst for more remote consultations among many medical professions. Optometry won’t escape that.
Recent years have seen several teleoptometry platforms come to the fore, mainly in the US, with varied degrees of success. Most notable has been online refraction tool, Visibly (formerly Opternative), which has had a rollercoaster few years of legal wrangles with the FDA over its technology, but it is now free to operate under temporary exemptions during the Covid-19 pandemic. Visibly will be in a much better bargaining position with the FDA on full approval of the technology when the crisis in the US eases and it’s hard to imagine the same level of resistance as before.
Here in the UK, the logical progression for teleoptometry will be a move from remote consultations to remote refraction, because the public will be used to the technology in a way that they couldn’t imagine just a couple of months ago. Regulators and the various associations seem, to me at least, to be sleepwalking on this subject – even before outbreak of coronavirus. The inertia of telemedicine will be hard to hold back.