Bradley Merrill Thompson, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, authored an article in MobiHealthNews, titled “FDA’s Support of AI in Telemedicine.”
Following is an excerpt:
Many appreciate that telemedicine is more than just using Skype so that a doctor can look a patient in the eyes. For telemedicine to be truly useful, the patient must be able to collect and transmit a variety of data the healthcare professional needs in order to assess the patient’s health. Indeed, state regulators have historically been skeptical of telemedicine precisely because they fear that the doctor-patient relationship in that context is too thin, with doctors being forced to make judgments based on too little available information.
Artificial intelligence can help. It can help with data collection by instructing patients how to use medical technology that collects data. It can help physicians sort through and analyze the data they do receive. It can even help deliver therapy.
In the face of COVID-19 with its attendant greater need for medical services while achieving social distancing, is FDA now ready to support the use of AI in telemedicine? I think they are.
