![]() Some reviews have identified small to moderate reductions in pain, disability, and psychological symptoms in intervention groups applying telemedicine when compared with the control (including standard pain care or waitlist control) ( Buhrman et al., 2016 Mariano et al., 2019). In most pain management settings, telemedicine has been used in the form of video consultation, which mainly focuses on complaints that can be orally solved, such as palliative care and self-management skills. In response, the Chinese government launched a series of policies to support the development of telemedicine and “cloud hospitals.” In March 2020, the United States government announced that telemedicine services would be reimbursed by the Medicare and Drug Enforcement Administration, who allowed the prescription of controlled medicine via telemedicine ( ATA, 2020). These changed conditions have boosted reform of the healthcare system. During the current COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for treatment at a distance from healthcare providers surged essentially overnight ( Calton et al., 2020 Humphreys et al., 2020). Telemedicine has gradually been adopted by patients over the last decade ( Adamse et al., 2018). For patients with demands that cannot be delayed and are impossible to fulfill with the medical resources on site because of isolation protocols or resource limitations, telemedicine has offered an alternative solution ( Keesara et al., 2020). Consequently, some medical needs could be delayed and not met. Patients are also avoiding visiting medical facilities that may be considered a potential source of infection ( Keesara et al., 2020). Thus, elective operations/therapies and non-emergency medical procedures have nearly all come to a halt in most medical centers. Governments and medical providers have had to reallocate labor and material resources to deal with this abrupt emergency. Many countries have issued strict isolation measures or have at least advocated “social distancing” in people’s daily lives. By the end of July 2020, there were over 19 million confirmed cases of infection and 712,000 deaths due to COVID-19 worldwide. The world has changed rapidly due to the disastrous Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In summary, we demonstrated that a remote wireless programming system can deliver safe and effective programming operations of implantable SCS device, thereby providing palliative care of value to the most vulnerable chronic pain patients during a pandemic.Ĭlinical Trial Registration: identifier NCT 03858790. Five patients complained of an unstable connection resulting from the low network speed initially, and three of these patients solved this problem. Eleven of the 16 (68.8%) patients reported that the system was user-friendly and met their needs. Improvement was achieved with programming adjustment in 12 of 13 (92.3%) cases. Thirteen of the 16 patients required programming for parameter optimization. During the COVID-19 pandemic from January 23, 2020, the date of lockdown of Wuhan, to April 30, 2020, 34 sessions of remote programming were conducted with 16 patients. Here, we introduce the first remote and wireless programming system that enables healthcare providers to perform video-based real-time programming and palliative medicine for pain patients with a SCS implant. Although telemedicine has shown a great effect in many healthcare scenarios, there have been fewer applications of such technology focusing on the interaction with implanted devices. The isolation required to fight this pandemic makes it impossible for such patients to adjust the parameters or configuration of the device on site. However, pain never stops, particularly for patients with chronic intractable pain and implanted spinal cord stimulation (SCS) devices. 5Institute of Epilepsy, Beijing Institute for Brain Disorders, Beijing, ChinaĪs COVID-19 rampages throughout the world and has a major impact on the healthcare system, non-emergency medical procedures have nearly come to a halt due to appropriate resource reallocation.4IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.3Precision Medicine and Healthcare Research Center, Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China.2National Engineering Laboratory for Neuromodulation, School of Aerospace Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.1Department of Neurosurgery, Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital, School of Clinical Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.Yang Lu 1,2† Duo Xie 2† Xiaolei Zhang 1 Sheng Dong 1 Huifang Zhang 1 Beibei Yu 1 Guihuai Wang 1* James Jin Wang 1* Luming Li 2,3,4,5*
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