Eye contact with patients is important to me. This is how we show ourselves as people. The eyes are the windows to the soul. Through them we build trust, empathy and mutuality.
When I am face to face with a patient it is not always possible, but I do my best.
As with the IRL experience, I try to achieve some level of eye contact during telemedicine encounters. But the care through a screen poses a challenge to eye contact. The problem is, the only way I can make that eye-to-eye connection is to look straight into my camera. So I look directly at the patient. What they experience is that I connect directly to them in the most human way possible. Hopefully it will serve as an indicator of my focus and range.
The problem is that telemedical eye contact is an illusion. Because I can’t see them. In this case, I only see the lens of my camera. At the edge of my lower field of vision appear the mother’s face and the critical signals of her reaction to what I say. Sometimes I pretend to be able to see with an affirmative expression on my face. But it’s part of a friendly charade to make it look real to the family on the other side of the screen.
And of course, trying to record your note during the telemedicine visit adds an entirely different level of separation.
Now there is a real possibility that if I looked at them directly on the screen, people would actually see that lower focus as eye contact. A sort of distant focus – a substitute for the IRL contact that the recipient fully understands. A new human understanding of the 21st century connection.
I heard that there is a technology that has a micro camera dangling in the center of the screen. It allows you to see the person on the other side while seeing that you are directly looking at them as they speak. Maybe that’s the answer.
While telemedicine improves access to care, it always represents a compromise in the person-to-person connection. The illusion of telemedical eye contact is just one example.
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Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash
