A note from Dr. Farzana Badrun
I have a patient — I will not say who, this is not about any one person — who used to reschedule almost every appointment. Not because she did not need care. Because she was juggling a job, two kids, and a two-hour round trip to see me, and something always came up that made that trip impossible on any given week. By the time she would finally get in, whatever we needed to talk about had usually been sitting unaddressed for a month or more.
That is the problem telemedicine actually solves. Not “convenience” in some abstract, marketing-brochure sense — the very real fact that healthcare has, for a long time, asked more of people’s time and logistics than it has any right to.
What telemedicine actually is
Strip away the tech-forward branding, and telemedicine is simple: it is a real visit with me, over video or phone, instead of in the exam room. Same conversation. Same attention. Same unhurried time. The only thing that changes is the four walls around it.
I know “video call with your doctor” can sound, to some people, like a downgrade — like you are getting the discount version of care because you did not come in. I want to be honest with you: that has not been my experience of it, on either side of the screen. I ask the same questions. I listen the same way. If anything, I have found people are sometimes more at ease talking from their own kitchen table than they are in a paper gown on an exam table.
What it is actually good for
Not everything, and I will always tell you when it is not. Your annual physical needs my hands and my stethoscope in the room with you — that is not up for negotiation, and it is part of how I keep good care good. But a huge amount of primary care does not require that:
- Talking through how a new medication is working
- Managing a chronic condition that is already stable and just needs a check-in
- Sorting out whether a rash, a cough, or a stomach bug needs anything more than reassurance and a plan
- Going over lab results and what they mean
- The mental health conversation I wrote about a few weeks ago — the kind that needs time, not a table with stirrups
Why “anywhere in Georgia” is not just a tagline
I practice in Buckhead, but Georgia is a big state, and a lot of it does not have easy access to a primary care doctor at all — let alone one who will actually spend time with you. Telemedicine means the patient in Savannah, or Albany, or way up in the mountains near Blairsville, gets the same relationship with me that my Atlanta patients do. Not a nurse line. Not a rotating on-call stranger. Me, on the screen, who already knows your history because I am the one who has been managing it.
There is one thing state regulation does still require, and I think it is worth mentioning plainly rather than burying it in fine print: I do need to see you in person at least once a year. That is not a New Essence Health policy — it is a Georgia state requirement for anyone practicing telemedicine, and it exists for good reason. In practice, this just means your annual physical happens here in the office, and everything else in between can happen from wherever you are.
Simple, on purpose
I called this “Telemedicine Made Simple” because that is genuinely the goal — not simple as in stripped-down, but simple as in no longer complicated to access good care. No two-hour drive to ask a question that takes ten minutes to answer. No choosing between missing work and missing your appointment. Just a call, at a time that works, with the same doctor who already knows you.
If it has been a while since you thought of your doctor’s visit as something that could actually fit into your day instead of taking it over — that is the whole point of this.
— Dr. Farzana Badrun
