Digital empathy in the time of telemedicine

Telemedicine is far from perfect, but during the COVID-19 pandemic it became an essential tool for delivering care. Will the trend towards telemedicine continue after the pandemic, or fall by the wayside? Dr. Matt Sakumoto, a virtualist primary care physician at University of California, San Francisco, describes the concept of digital empathy in telemedicine and how it could help this technology be more than just a blip on the health care radar.

This idea of digital empathy is, we're having new channels to communicate with, but you want to be able to preserve some of those traditional, empathetic qualities and characteristics so that a patient feels heard and that emotions and meaning are conveyed correctly.

Matt Sakumoto, MD, virtualist, assistant clinical professor, University of California, San Francisco