Accessing Pioneering Work: Samantha McGill’s Path to TeleNeurology

When Samantha McGill was 12 years old and visiting Egypt with her father, she saw a woman sitting on the street corner with two other children. The trio were coughing and appeared to be very ill, yet they were being ignored by all passersby and without any help.

“Everyone was walking away from them, and I just thought someone needs to walk toward them,” remembers McGill, now Access TeleCare’s Neurology Service Line Lead APP.

It was a world of difference from the standards of living that McGill had grown up with in Fairfax, Virginia, where her father, originally from Egypt, worked as an engineer, and her mother, from Jordan, worked in computer science. Yet that trip to Egypt was the moment McGill remembers wanting to go into healthcare.

“It was a culture shock to go from here to the streets of Cairo,” said McGill. “To see health problems become debilitating because there’s no access, I think shaped me from a really young time that I wanted to do something tangible with my life. That was always the plan.”

But what drew her to neurology in particular? For McGill, that connection was also personal. When she was only about a year and a half old, her younger sister was born two and a half months premature — and she required a ventricular shunt to move fluid from her brain to her stomach.

This led to McGill being in and out of neurology offices throughout her early childhood. Ultimately, the support of these neurologists would see her sister grow up without any medical issues, and McGill with a deep appreciation for specialty.

Putting Passion Into Practice

After deciding that neurology was where she wanted to go with her medical career, McGill entered a master’s program to become an NP at Emory in Atlanta. She worked in the hospital’s outpatient brain center, the premiere clinic in the region for the most difficult cases. McGill spent time each week staffing an MS clinic and a dizziness clinic, often seeing patients who had traveled for hours to get there. McGill said she loved the investigatory nature of working on the most difficult cases.

“Neuro is fascinating. It’s such a detailed exam. You’re like an investigator trying to find the details that others maybe couldn’t see it. They call neuro to come in and solve a big mystery, and I like that a lot,” McGill said.

Launching a Pilot teleNeurology Program

It was at Emory that McGill and several of her mentors saw a potential for using telemedicine to connect with their patients.

“A lot of the neurologists were bought in. I had mentioned it to our director, that it would be nice to not have this migraine patient drive six hours to see me just to refill medications,” McGill.

The goal was to provide the best possible care to patients, and that meant not forcing them to drive huge distances for issues that could just as easily be handled with a video call.

Yet, despite the impetus from providers to try, the program did not have the logistic support or buy-in from administration to truly get off the ground. “It was a flop,” McGill said candidly.

After about 3 years in the outpatient clinic, McGill transitioned to the inpatient side, providing general neurohospitalist coverage. “It was the most acute side of neurology, and it was also patients having active events. I really liked it, having to figure things out quickly and getting patients care quickly.”

Moving to Access TeleCare

In 2021, McGill’s husband got his dream job in South Florida — which meant she would have to leave Atlanta and Emory. She was looking through the job boards at the American Academy of Neurology when she came across Access TeleCare. They weren’t looking for APPs at the time, only neurologists. Yet, with her background in acute care and her experience trying to launch a telemedicine program at Emory, McGill figured it was worth a conversation.

As it turns out, she took the opportunity to pitch an expansion of Access TeleCare’s programs to include teleNuero APPs. It was something Access had been considering — McGill was hired, and within a year she was helping to open Access TeleCare’s first teleNeuro site in Naples, Florida with APP coverage. “It’s common with inpatient, in-person medicine to see an APP instead of a physician,” McGill said. “What we’ve done is transfer that to telemedicine.”

Today, Access TeleCare has the largest teleNeuro APP program of its kind, and McGill considers that an amazing opportunity for any neurology APPs interested in telemedicine. “I think that is just a really cool opportunity to do pioneering work,” she said.

Meanwhile, McGill is exactly where she was inspired to be by her early experience in Egypt: improving access to care for those who need it most.