VIDEO: DME care impacted by disparities in health care access

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

I can tell you it leads to significant delays. And in fact, before I got on this call with you, I just got a phone call about a patient who's having an access problem because they have a particular type of insurance and they're asking if they can come to our facility for care. And the answer was, "We don't take that insurance, unfortunately." Even in our organization, insurance unfortunately dictates a lot of access to care in the health care environment and the health care arena. It's outside the scope of the hospitals, unfortunately, and organizations. We would love to take every insurance plan available but insurance plans sometimes don't pick us to take care of their patients. So certainly there can be delays in care.

And one of the other things I think we should also highlight is that there's a lack of specialists that are doing sort of the work that I do and others do in our community. And so therefore, with that lack of access, lack of ability to get to somebody, that also leads to delays in care. And we know that that can have huge impacts. We did a study a while ago on patients with proliferative diabetic retinopathy. And the recommendation is you get a treatment within a month. But we know that many patients don't get it for 2 or 3 months. And what we found essentially is when you went from three months or beyond, you had irreparable loss of vision that could not be recovered despite therapy. So I think that, you know, that speaks to the utmost importance of getting in early and hopefully getting in soon with patients to get them treated and evaluated.