House Calls? With Real Doctors? Seriously?
Seriously. A resurgence of house calls means that modern Americans can finally enjoy a convenience that our great grandparents took for granted. Falling someplace in between Doc Baker from Little House on the Prairie and Bones McCoy on Star Trek, the modern house call doctor shows up at your home or office with a trusty medical bag filled with high tech devices not so far removed from the handheld medical tricorder wielded by Bones back in 1966. (Who didn’t think that tricorder was the coolest?)
House Calls for the 21st Century
House calls had virtually disappeared by 1980, but a gradual reappearance of home-based urgent and primary care began in the early 2000’s, and it accelerated to fast-forward with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Suddenly in early 2020, visiting a doctor’s office felt like playing Russian roulette. Patients began suffering because doctors and hospitals stopped offering many preventative tests, and routine check-ups and immunizations were put on hold. In such a climate, home-based primary care (HBPC), telemedicine, and urgent care at home began to gain popularity among both patients and physicians.
Doctors Take Tech on the Road
As tech savvy adults already knew in 2020 and everyone else quickly came to realize, when push comes to shove you don’t really have to leave your home for much of anything these days. We might imagine that all the high tech tools used by physicians for diagnosis and treatment would require patients to come to them, but that is simply not the case any longer. The technology exists to make an amazing number of healthcare services portable and therefore mobile.
● Point-of-care testing offers quick results with no need for a lab.
● Portable centrifuges for spinning lab samples plug into a car’s power outlet.
● Cloud-based electronic patient records give everyone on a person’s medical team immediate access almost anywhere.
● Tools like smart watches and Oura rings offer 24/7 biometric monitoring.
● Intravenous lines can deliver fluids or medicine at home.
● Smartphone apps make scheduling simple and can offer support services.
● Equipment that used to be huge, such as ultrasound, X-ray, and EKG machines, have been made small and portable.
● An array of electronic devices allow for telemedicine visits, if applicable.
The result? 24/7 healthcare wherever you are whenever you need it. More and more physicians are acknowledging the value of offering such a service. For physicians, it eliminates the overhead of maintaining an office and staff, and it allows them to evaluate the home environment to assess possible health risks and suggest solutions. HBPC has become so popular that teaching future physicians the art of the house call is becoming part of the curriculum for some medical schools.