Profiles in Telehealth: A Doctor Expands Her Medical Career through Telemedicine

We interviewed Dr. Sally to learn about her journey to telemedicine. She practiced family medicine in Nepal before returning to the United States 10 years ago. Now, she's building her telemedicine career through Wheel!

What’s your background? What did you do before practicing telemedicine?

I am a board-certified Family Medicine Physician. As a child, I dreamed of becoming a volunteer or a missionary doctor in some remote part of the world. My dream came true when I got to practice in Nepal after completing my Family Medicine training at the Loma Linda University Medical Center ten years ago. Since returning back to the US, I’ve had the privilege of working in the ER of a critical access hospital for the last six and a half years. I’ve once again changed gears and am now practicing telemedicine full-time. It is one of the best decisions I ever made!

What’s your life like outside of work?

My husband Aaron and I have four beautiful children, three cats, and a dog named Maxx. We are a homeschooling family and love spending time outdoors. We also enjoy working on projects together as a family, gardening, camping, traveling, trying out different recipes, and playing music. We have been blessed to find our home in the Northeast corner of Washington.

What brought you to telemedicine?

When we decided to move back from Nepal, my husband and I decided practicing telemedicine would be the best option for our family. It would give us the flexibility of when and where we wanted to work, maximizing our time together. Unfortunately, practicing telemedicine full-time was not an option for us at the time. The right opportunity was not yet available and miraculously, the local ER needed two family medicine physicians. I was still interested in telemedicine, so I signed up with a couple of companies two years into being in the ER but did not actively engage in it until this pandemic hit! After understanding how telemedicine was the key solution in providing ways for people to access care, I knew it was time to commit to this burgeoning field of medicine.

What’s your recent Wheel Moment of Freedom?

When I discovered Wheel, I realized it was the perfect solution in starting to help build my telemedicine career. Here was a team I could trust in finding the right telemedicine opportunities for me. Now with hundreds of telemedicine companies on the rise, I can depend on Wheel to do all the sifting, sorting, and testing that I would have had to do on my own to find the virtual care practices that I would want to commit to. I greatly appreciate Wheel’s promise in finding the best practices with the highest qualities and standards.

What do you think the future of healthcare holds?

What excites me about the future of healthcare is how promising telehealth is in becoming the mainstay of how patients receive their medical care.

I believe with the integration of AI technology, innovative medical devices, and flexible platforms, telemedicine will be the new way of medicine.

Physicians’ interactions through telehealth will become extremely streamlined, effective, and efficient for both physicians and patients to focus on what really is important. It will not only be convenient and cost-effective but essential for patients to be able to connect with their physicians virtually.

Thanks, Dr. Sally, for being an essential member of the #WheelCareTeam!

Interested in joining us? Sign up to learn more about working in telehealth with Wheel. We need clinicians more than ever during the COVID-19 national crisis.

Learn more about provider experiences in our previous spotlight interviews with an entrepreneurial nurse practitioner pushing limits, a physician re-discovering flexibility with virtual care, and a nurse practitioner who became more active with her kids due to telemedicine.