In this video clip from a Motley Fool Live interview, recorded on April 11, KPMG Partner Kristin Pothier answers a question from Fool.com contributor Rachel Warren about some of the interesting new virtual trends in telehealth.
Kristin Pothier: A lot of the work that we do is with health systems. Health systems have seen this transition to digital health, this transition to telehealth, teletherapy, especially in mental health. It has really helped a number of patients that maybe either couldn't get to the doctor or weren't comfortable getting to the doctor.
Now we have family health ability where families can sit in their own living rooms with their therapist on the other end of the line and really talk through things and be able to do it where they don't miss appointments. They don't have to worry about getting on their bus or in their car to go to a therapy area and actually make that help for the mental health community.
I would say for the rest of telehealth as well, there are some things that you need to see a doctor for. That will never go away. In order to have a biopsy done, in order to really work into understanding a diagnosis, usually you have to see a patient. But we are seeing even in areas that have classically only been able to be done in the hospital is starting to branch out.
For example, the trend of liquid biopsy, which means instead of taking a chunk of tumor out of a patient, you take a sample of blood and you're able to look at the signature of the tumor in the blood. This is something that can be done at home. When you really look at this and you see the monitoring capabilities, and you see the progression of cancer care, we're going to be doing more of that as we move forward.
That's really all due to some of this innovation, both from a perspective of the wet chemistry, but then also the availability of the digital ecosystem that goes along with it.
