Covid-19: Telemedicine key to US health care even after pandemic ends

A patient sits in the living room of her apartment in the Brooklyn borough of New York during a telemedicine video conference with a doctor. Doctors and advocates of telemedicine say that the administration should restore patient privacy protections by ensuring that once the pandemic has passed, only those telemedicine platforms that encrypt information and are safe from hacking are used. — AP

WASHINGTON: As thousands of patients struck by Covid-19 rushed to seek treatment in overcrowded New York City hospitals, intensive care specialists more than 350 miles away at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center stepped up to provide remote assistance to beleaguered colleagues in New York.

Specialists in Pittsburgh can read the electronic medical records of Covid-19 patients at the New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center in Lower Manhattan and use telemedicine platforms to provide advice, for example, on how to care for patients on ventilators.