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This week’s Making Rounds spotlights Laura Demuth, SVP of patient care at Curology, a telehealth dermatology company. Curology provides patients customized topical medications prescribed by a licensed dermatologist to help treat acne or antiaging concerns. Employing more than 100 physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners, Curology has served 4+ million patients since its founding in 2014.
Demuth discussed how the pandemic made telehealth more accessible and what she thinks lies ahead in the future of personalized medicine.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
Our patients are mostly seen via asynchronous store-and-forward technology and telehealth. What that means is patients go through a questionnaire and medical history, then they upload photographs and send that information to us. Instead of either getting on a Zoom call or talking to me on the phone, in many cases, they’re getting a response back from us on how best to manage their skin, and then it’s signed by a medical provider. But because it’s not live, a lot of patients question whether or not we’re real, and I’m here to say we are real.
What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place you worked?
During the Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of telehealth licensing restrictions were lifted across states to help expand care and keep patients out of medical offices who didn’t need to be seen there.
For companies like Curology—and other companies that deliver digital healthcare—the lifted telehealth restrictions expedited everything, from a licensing and regulatory standpoint, in many states by almost a decade. So it really advanced care in a way that probably wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. We’re able to meet patients where they are and give them care where they feel most comfortable, which in many cases is their homes. For things like skincare, they may feel embarrassed about the state of their skin; they may not want to leave the house or go out without makeup to have their face examined.
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What healthcare trends are you most optimistic about and why?
The personalization of medicine is really something that I gravitate toward and I learn a lot—not just in skincare and dermatology, which is my area of expertise, but I learn the way that all telehealth platforms that are servicing multiple different verticals are able to provide individualized care in a way that’s not possible in a clinic or hospital setting. And really, it puts the patients in the driver’s seat and empowers them to make choices and empowers them to feel like partners in their own care.
The major thing there is the intake process. You can imagine sitting in a doctor’s office. They ask for your address, your insurance information, your demographic information—but a lot of times in skincare and dermatology in general, they’re not asking you what your specific healthcare or skincare goals are. Traditional medicine is built for the insurance world and things like that. With personalization, the increased access to patients across the US via telehealth platforms—whether they be the computer or the phone or something like that—allows us as clinicians and telehealth companies to be able to reach across the table and ask those patients what matters to them.