As telemedicine catches fire, its earliest critics are embracing change — and still harboring doubts

If you’d talked to Joe Heyman around the 2000s, you might have taken him as a telemedicine naysayer. Back then, the Massachusetts OB-GYN was highly skeptical of the rash of new services sprouting up to remotely connect patients and physicians. He was wary, he told STAT, of patients “calling a total stranger and asking for clinical care,” and worried about building trust when a new doctor picked up the phone every time. He never once conducted a visit via video by the time he retired from seeing patients in 2014.