Aditi Joshi, MD Assistant Professor/ Medical Director, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital and JeffConnect

Dr. Aditi Joshi is an experienced Emergency Medicine Physician and Telehealth expert working on improving healthcare through technology. She is the Medical Director of JeffConnect, Jefferson’s telehealth platform and has worked in this modality for over 6 years in education, training, quality and operations. She currently runs both an on-demand telehealth program and tele-intake, finding new ways of using this modality in acute and emergent care.

She is associate director of the digital health scholarly inquiry at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, director of the Telehealth fellowship, and an assistant professor in the department of emergency medicine. She teaches and trains students, residents and attending about telehealth and health innovation with both practical and research components, helping to hone how current and future physicians think about how technology will change medical practice.

Dr. Joshi on Improving Care Delivery through Digital Health

Some of the pain points that we find as physicians are around not having great electronic medical records, where we have access to people’s records from all over, that would be very helpful. Currently, the one that we use, we’re able to see some of the documents from around the city, which is great but having access to everyone’s records would be very helpful. I think it’s also helpful if patients had access to their records, and if they knew that we were looking at, for instance: if things needed to be corrected, especially their medications, we would have easier access to it.

The other really big pain point is that a lot of patients because of the way our insurance works, we’re not able to give them great care because they can’t access healthcare in a real way. So we have a lot of patients who will come through our emergency department, we’re able to give them the care that we can at that moment, but we are not set up for chronic care management. We are not set up for follow up. And if there isn’t an available doctor, if they can’t pay for it or if they’re under insurance then they’re not going to be able to get the care that they need

Just to clarify, this is not an issue of people not having insurance. There is a huge myth out there that is an over utilization of healthcare. Access is a problem of geography. It’s also being under insured, it’s also not having enough specialists and primary care physicians out there. So it’s a bigger problem than just one that we want to blame patients for. We should not do that.

This interview was recorded at HIMSS Conference