Is the Future of the Annual Physical Exam Virtual and Digital?
Getting an annual physical exam usually means a routine visit to your physician’s office to check your blood pressure, heart rate, blood markers, and body for signs of disease. It is estimated that one in five adult Americans undergoes a routine in-person physical exam every year.
But as we know, the pandemic threw everything off-course and disrupted healthcare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 31.5 % of U.S. adults avoided routine care due to concerns about COVID-19. But what if the annual physical became virtual and digital?
In the Wall Street Journal article, Ron Winslow explores why “Tech Advances Put the Annual Doctor Visit on the Critical List.”
In the article, Michael Blum, MD, a University of California San Francisco (UCSF) cardiologist and Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) predicts the quality of physical exams would be the same in or out of the office in five to 10 years’ time, and that at the rapid pace of where we are headed, “the technology in 10 to 20 years’ time will look nothing like the technology we have now.”
Blum’s colleague UCSF cardiologist Geoffrey Tison weighs in on the topic citing data from the annual physical is “not that robust.” He adds that doctors could provide electronic reports to patients on metrics such as their blood pressure based on data from digital devices*, and unless there are abnormal flags, in-person exams could be set for every two or three years.