Reinventing Dermatologic Patient Care During COVID-19

Margareth Pierre-Louis, MD, a dermatologist at Twin Cities Dermatology in Minneapolis, has made it her mission to provide skin care for patients, regardless of their race, skin tone, and background. Oftentimes, the ability for patients to use digital tools can be frustrating to providers - as it can lead to self-diagnosis and unnecessary fear (think WebMD). However, Dr. Pierre-Louis is embracing the shift to digital tools, using skin tracking apps and secure platforms, such as MiiSkin, to communicate and monitor patients’ skin lesions remotely. 

In this video, Dr Margareth Pierre-Louis discusses how dermatologic patient care has been reinvented during the COVID-19 pandemic.

TRANSCRIPT-

Dr. Margareth Pierre-Louis:  It's been an exciting time in healthcare because we were pushed whether we wanted to or not. The first thing that happened to our practice, we had to shut down, because in the state of Minnesota, we had to, temporarily. That disrupted everything in terms of us being able to deliver patient care. They basically had to find other ways to get their care.

What we did? We had to start using digital health. We had to start using virtual visits. Basically, putting in place other ways so we can meet our patients' needs. We've been using telehealth and telemedicine since 2018 when we launched our practice, but definitely, the pandemic moved things along more dramatically than we ever thought.

For me, it was the virtual visits we had to start implementing because we had to provide our patients' care. We had to make sure that it was effective care, not just any care. We had to learn how telehealth and telemedicine works, especially when it comes to insurance billing. That has been the biggest thing that the pandemic has pushed on us.

It's one thing for us as providers to have to start using telemedicine, but patients, because they had to be siloed and they needed to find other ways to get their care, they even became more so the digital patient where they were trying to find ways to get care and maybe not even from their own dermatologist, from other outlets.

Teladoc is a platform out there that I've worked with for years. The number of cases on Teladoc just skyrocketed because patients needed care and in the middle of the pandemic, it was really hard to get into the physical space of a dermatology clinic.