Hello patients and friends-
I wanted to give you all an update on the current plan to start seeing patients in my office again.
For the past six weeks, I have mainly been seeing patients through video chat or over the phone, with a few exceptions for urgent problems. It has been an interesting experience, to say the least!
While I can learn a lot from a video chat, nothing replaces the ability to actually look in the ears, nose, and throat to confirm the diagnosis.
I think ENT is a particularly difficult specialty for telemedicine since so much of it involves looking into small dark holes. There is really no way to look in someone's ears or nose over a video chat, and a blurry video of someone's mouth and throat is definitely not the same as in person!
I am planning to start seeing more patients in the office next week, with the following heightened safety measures in place:
All patients must bring and wear a mask the entire time they are in the office. Cloth or other home-made masks are acceptable. We have a very limited supply and cannot provide masks. Any patient who arrives without a mask will be turned away and rescheduled to a later appointment.
No patients will stay in our waiting room. Arrive at your appointed time, enter the office and someone will bring you straight back to the exam room.
New patients must do their intake paperwork ahead of time through the online portal or print at home.
Only the patient is allowed in the office. For children and adult patients who require a caretaker, one adult may accompany the patient.
Dr. Kumra and staff will wear masks during all patient encounters.
We are performing diligent hand washing and extra cleaning precautions.
We have central air filtration in each exam room.
All patients will be screened prior to appointment for fever, cough, shortness of breath, cold/flu symptoms, red eyes, loss of smell/taste, and body aches.
Prior to your appointment, we request that you go to this website, and use the CDC self-checker to evaluate your risk for Covid (blue button on right side of page):
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fsymptoms-testing%2Findex.html
Telemedicine appointments will still be available for higher risk patients and for routine follow up issues (like test results, etc).
I hope all of you and your families are staying safe and healthy during these challenging times. Please call us with any questions at 212-580-1483.
Warm regards,
Dr. Kumra
