Dr Marisa McGinley Explains How Technology Can Expand MS Care Access

Marisa McGinley, DO, assistant professor of neurology at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, explains how technology can help improve access to multiple sclerosis (MS) care.

She presented on the topic during the session, "MS Across Populations and Access to Care" on February 29 at Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in MS (ACTRIMS) Forum 2024.

Transcript

How can technology help to improve MS care access?

Technology definitely has a lot of potential, and I think the most obvious potential is decreasing that geographic barrier. So, as we're talking about for rural communities, in particular, they live a far distance. It's not necessarily reasonable to think that a patient's going to spend 2 days traveling, taking a day off, maybe spending a night.

So technology, specifically teleneurology, really helps decrease that barrier. You can have your 30-minute visit, and the patient can do that even on a lunch break, which decreases the burden of having to take time off work, travel expenses.

I think that technology really has that advantage, but in addition to geographic barriers, it's also just the fact that a lot of our MS patients are working, they have family obligations, and taking time to get to a health care professional, in general, can be quite difficult. I think that technology maybe is one of the only good things that came out of the pandemic; patients became more comfortable, providers became more comfortable with that context, so I think it helps integrate that into a health care model to decrease a lot of those barriers of getting to a physical office location.

There are other technologies, I think, that are going to be coming that help us monitor neurologic function outside of the office environment, too, because I think another frustrating thing for clinicians and also patients is an office visit is very much a snapshot. I think, as we develop technologies that integrate with the medical system, that patients can provide more patient-reported outcomes and things that are happening to them during their daily lives, that we can get more data on how things are going during their day as opposed to just that one-time office visit.

I think technology has a great opportunity to decrease barriers and help us really understand how the disease is impacting our patients' daily life experience.