Culture of Health Blog

My change leadership journey was ignited by a spark of dissatisfaction when I was about 7 or 8 years old, growing up on the small island of Dominica. I walked into a doctor’s office with my mother, brother, and younger sister. My mother called the doctor from the phone in the lobby, and in minutes, we were whisked right into the consulting room, bypassing about two dozen other patients who looked tired and sick.

I imagined that these other families had driven for hours in a truck on dusty, potholed roads to get to this office in Roseau. They waited hours for medical care, only to be forced to wait longer to accommodate the needs of my family. That moment, jumping that line, felt awful. Right then, I decided to become a doctor so that I could make things better for people living in poverty.

In Hagerstown, rural Maryland, tucked amongst a series of charming brick buildings is Wells House, a long-standing charity. It provides recovery services to community members battling drug and alcohol dependencies. But for some time, what Wells House didn’t have was a regular clinician to provide specific, evidence-based opioid treatment.

Wells House eventually turned to “telemedicine”—using technology to tap into a network of physicians who could provide treatment remotely. The initial idea came from Eric Weintraub, MD, director of substance abuse services at University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM). The charity had sought out his help in prescribing and managing buprenorphine treatment for clients with opioid disorders. But frequent travel out to Wells House from Baltimore posed a problem for Weintraub and his colleagues. So he turned to technology.

“It was a no-brainer,” Weintraub said. “Medication-assisted treatment is the gold standard for opioid addiction, and we have learned that telemedicine is as effective in most places as face-to-face care, so why not put the two together?”