What to have written down before a telehealth appointment

What to have written down before a telehealth appointment

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Telehealth appointments are short. Fifteen minutes is common, and a meaningful part of that goes on connection problems and pleasantries. If you arrive without your numbers you will spend the rest of it reconstructing them out loud, badly, and the clinical decision gets made on whatever you happened to remember.

The list is shorter than people expect. Your current dose and the date you started it. The dates of any doses you missed or deliberately held, and why. Your weight now and at the last appointment. Any side effects, with rough dates and whether they are getting better or worse.

Dates are the part people skip and the part clinicians actually use. Saying nausea has been bad is a very different statement from saying nausea started two days after the step up on the eleventh and has eased since. The first invites a guess. The second answers the question.

It is also worth knowing what you have physically in the fridge, because supply comes up in almost every one of these calls, and being able to say you have five weeks left at the current dose saves a whole exchange of messages afterwards.

My habit is to open a dose tracking tool before the call and skim the last two months, which takes about a minute and means I answer from a record rather than from memory. Memory of injection dates is unreliable in a way people do not appreciate, because every week looks like every other week.

Finally, write down what was decided while the call is still fresh. New dose, next review date, anything to watch for. A decision that lives only in your recollection of a video call has a short half life.

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