Six-year-old Peyton Denette works on her speech and language skills with speech-language pathologist Olivia Chiu of Two Can Talk remotely from her home in Mississauga, Ont., Monday. Photo: Nathan Denette / THE CANADIAN PRESS
(Giuseppe Valiante/ Canadian Press) — Despite years of discussions between politicians and doctors, the Quebec government couldn’t find a way to pay its general practitioners for phone and video consultations with patients.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Premier Francois Legault called a public health emergency March 14, sweeping aside legislative hurdles as well as the bureaucratic inertia of Quebec’s health care network. Within days, family doctors across the province could be paid to examine patients by phone or video.
But so-called telemedicine is likely just one of the technological legacies this crisis will leave. Experts in medicine, artificial intelligence, education and many other fields say they expect the pandemic to fast-forward innovations that will benefit the world long after the novel coronavirus has run its course.
Dr. Louis Godin, president of Quebec’s federation of general practitioners, said the pandemic has done what years of talk failed to accomplish. (…)
