At 2 a.m. in February, I found myself speaking with the family of a dying man. We had never met before, and I had only just learned of the patient. As an ICU doctor, I have been in this situation on many occasions, but there was something new this time. The family was 200 miles away, and we were talking through a video camera. I was staffing the electronic intensive care unit, complete with a headset, adjustable two-way video camera, and six screens of streaming data. The eICU at Emory University in Atlanta provides care by physicians trained in critical care medicine to a number of hospital locations within the large Emory system.

A doctor speaking through a telepresence robot in California gave a dying patient and his family devastating medical news, raising questions about when the convenience of telemedicine should be skipped in favor of a face-to-face conversation. According to KTVU, Ernest Quintana was in the intensive care unit of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont, California, when a doctor on a video screen told Quintana that he wasn't likely to survive. "We knew that this was coming and that he was very sick. But I don't think somebody should get the news delivered that way. It should have been a human being come in," Quintana's granddaughter Annalisia Wilharm told KTVU.

A doctor speaking through a telepresence robot in California gave a dying patient and his family devastating medical news, raising questions about when the convenience of telemedicine should be skipped in favor of a face-to-face conversation. According to KTVU, Ernest Quintana was in the intensive care unit of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont, California, when a doctor on a video screen told Quintana that he wasn't likely to survive. "We knew that this was coming and that he was very sick. But I don't think somebody should get the news delivered that way. It should have been a human being come in," Quintana's granddaughter Annalisia Wilharm told KTVU.

Ernest Quintana's family knew he was dying of chronic lung disease when he was taken by ambulance to a hospital, unable to breathe. But they were devastated when a robot machine rolled into his room in the intensive care unit that night and a doctor told the 78-year-old patient by video call that he would probably die within days. "If you're coming to tell us normal news, that's fine, but if you're coming to tell us there's no lung left and we want to put you on a morphine drip until you die, it should be done by a human being and not a machine," his daughter Catherine Quintana said Friday. Ernest Quintana died Tuesday, two days after being taken to the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center emergency department in Fremont, Calif. Michelle Gaskill-Hames, senior vice president of Kaiser Permanente Greater Southern Alameda County, called the situation highly unusual and said officials "regret falling short" of the patient's expectations.