A report in MedPage Today claims that the experience of hospitals with significant surges of severely ill COVID-infected patients has delivered a powerful marketing case for the future of palliative care beyond the current pandemic, experts say.

While studies have shown that palliative care improves quality of life and reduces caregiver burden, not everyone can access it, “partly because we don’t have enough clinicians, services, and programs — especially for people outside of the hospital who are seriously ill but not hospice-eligible,” she said.

Enter telemedicine, which can dramatically increase access for people in community settings, at home, in assisted living facilities, in long-term care. One clinician can see 8 to 10 seriously ill patients a day at multiple sites without leaving the office — exponentially increasing access.

It’s not only more efficient for the clinician, it expands access for patients who can get to the clinic only with difficulty because they are homebound, live miles away or constrained by geographical barriers, or depend on public transit.

At the height of the COVID surge in New York City, three large health systems separately recruited and deployed palliative care and other professionals from across the country to serve as back-up volunteers to hospital teams on the ground. They gave debriefings for frontline providers, held family meetings and goals-of-care conversations online, even offered psychological and grief support.

“We have made huge strides toward building palliative care into the healthcare system focused on the broad concept of improving quality of life, recognizing that serious illness can turn one’s life upside down,” says Ashwin Kotwal, MD, assistant professor of geriatrics at the University of California San Francisco. “It’s not just about end-of-life support but addressing physical symptoms throughout the disease trajectory, along with psycho-social and spiritual needs. And communication is a big part of what we do.”

Kotwal spent the last year building a tele-palliative care program at the San Francisco VA Medical Center, focusing on patients who were homebound or who lived four hours or more from the clinic. Then COVID came along.

For Michael Fratkin, MD, founder and CEO of Resolution Care Network in Eureka, California, the telemedicine encounter is not just more convenient, it’s superior.

“The heart of the matter is the preservation of boundaries in healing relationships. We find that a video visit in real time is substantially better than invading people’s homes,” he says. “This is such a leveling technology. Something about the framing of the computer screen sets limits and puts us more on the same level. Clients show me only what they want to show me in their homes. It keeps the boundaries clearer.”

What happens on these visits for Fratkin’s community-based palliative care service, which covers a large rural area: trust-building; goal setting; shared-decision-making; advance care planning; symptom management. Surprisingly, he says, there are greater opportunities for intimacy in this encounter, even though the clinician can’t reach out and put a hand on the patient’s shoulder.

Of course, the future of telemedicine in palliative care will depend on reimbursement. Currently, temporary emergency Medicare waivers, extended for three months on July 23, have allowed payment for professional telehealth and some telephone visits, including physicians’ advance care planning conversations with patients and families. The emergency will end eventually, but at least 20 bills have been introduced in Congress to make some aspects of telemedicine coverage permanent.