If the pandemic taught us one thing, it is that video calls are a decent option when in-person meetings are off the table.

But what about when we feel sick enough that we need to see a doctor?

Can a Zoom exam room ever work as well as a trip to a clinic?

From KERA in Dallas, this is think.

I'm Chris Boyd.

My guest, Dr. Helen O'Yang, is an emergency physician and associate professor at Columbia University.

She's also a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine.

When her hospital started ramping up virtual ER visits as a way of reducing people's exposure

to the COVID virus, she had real concerns. How could a doctor and patient possibly connect

through a screen? What she discovered was not just surprising but illuminating. She wrote about this in a New York

Times essay titled, How Virtual Appointments taught me to be a Better Doctor. Helen, welcome back to

think. Thanks so much for having me on. So we all heard about virtual medical visits during the

pandemic. I did not realize these were ever used by emergency

departments. Were you surprised when your hospital made the decision to start experimenting with

these? Yeah, I was definitely surprised, Chris. We had done a smaller version of this in the

beginning before the pandemic, but we had not expanded to virtual urgent care.

So I was really surprised that as emergency room doctor, I would be seeing patients over video.

It was a big surprise to me.

You share that as an ER physician, you started your training with one fundamental question in

mind. What was that question? Well, what does

this patient have? So every time I see a patient, I walk into the room, I listen to their story,

I examine them, and then I try to figure out what diagnosis do they have. And from there,

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