Hospital patient learns he will die within days — from a robot showing video of doctor
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What happened?
Quintana's granddaughter Annalisia Wilharm, 33, was alone with him when a nurse came by his room to say a doctor would be making his rounds — and then a robot machine rolled in, the AP said.The robot had a video screen, and a doctor appeared on it, the outlet noted.
"This guy cannot breathe, and he's got this robot trying to talk to him," Willharm recalled to the AP. "Meanwhile, this guy is telling him, 'So we've got your results back, and there's no lung left. There's no lung to work with.'"
Wilharm told the outlet she had to repeat what the doctor said to her grandfather since he was hard of hearing in his right ear and the machine couldn't maneuver to the other side of the bed.
"So he's saying that maybe your next step is going to hospice at home. Right?" Wilharm was heard saying in a video she recorded of the visit, the AP reported.
"You know, I don't know if he's going to get home," the doctor said, the outlet noted.
The doctor on the robot video said Quintana would likely die within days, the AP reported.
Devastation
"If you're coming to tell us normal news, that's fine," Quintana's daughter Catherine Quintana told the outlet. "But if you're coming to tell us there's no lung left, and we want to put you on a morphine drip until you die, it should be done by a human being and not a machine."Quintana died last Tuesday, two days after being taken to the hospital, the AP reported.
What did the hospital have to say?
But the hospital also defended its use of telemedicine and added to the AP that its policy is to have a nurse or doctor in the room at the time of remote consultations.
"The evening video tele-visit was a follow-up to earlier physician visits," Gaskill-Hames told the outlet in a written response. "It did not replace previous conversations with patient and family members and was not used in the delivery of the initial diagnosis."
Hospital officials added that telemedicine doesn't replace in-person conversations with the patient and loved ones, the AP noted.
What does another doctor have to say about robots?
Pantilat added to the AP that video meetings are warm and intimate — and that not all in-person doctor visits are compassionate.
"No matter how well we deliver very difficult news, it's sad, and it's hard to hear," he noted to the outlet.
What else did Quintana's granddaughter say?
"He was such a sweet guy," she told the AP.
Hospital patient learns he will die within days — from a robot showing video of doctor
Reviewed by Facts
on
March 14, 2019
Rating: 5