KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Think you have to be in the same room with a doctor to have an exam? Not anymore. You don’t even have to be in the same state.

Little Annalesia McCoy is having her first virtual visit.

“Hi, doctor!” Annalesia says to the doctor she sees on a computer screen.

“I’m the computer doctor. How are you doing?” asks Dr. Jay Portnoy as he looks at his laptop.

Dr. Portnoy is in Kansas City at a Children’s Mercy clinic. Annalesia is in Wichita at a new Children’s Mercy clinic.
The allergy specialist uses headphones to listen to her heart and lungs through a digital stethoscope.

“I can hear more with this than I can with the regular stethoscope because it’s amplified,” Dr. Portnoy says.

Then the doc takes a look at some bumps on Annalesia’s skin. He diagnoses eczema and recommends treatments.

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Harrison Norris was born at risk more than two months early. He’s spent the first two weeks of life in the neonatal intensive care unit of the University of Kansas Hospital.

“The anxiety is there. He is very premature. Being here every time an alarm goes off, my heart kinda stops for a second,” says his mother, Lindsay Norris.

Research of Kansas City area pregnant women finds a possible way to lower the chances of a very premature birth. Dr. Susan Carlson of KU Medical Center led the study of 350 women published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Half the women took DHA — an omega three fatty acid found in fish oil. The others took a placebo. Fewer than one percent of the women who took DHA gave birth before 34 weeks compared to five percent of the other women which is about the national average.

(CNN) — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that it approved the availability of the Plan B One-Step emergency contraception pill without a prescription for women 15 and older.

This move comes just weeks after a federal judge in Brooklyn, New York, ordered the FDA to make the morning-after birth control pill available to women of any age, without a prescription. Tuesday’s FDA announcement, which pertains to an application from Teva Women’s Health, Inc., is not related to that, the FDA said.

“The FDA’s approval of Teva’s current application for Plan B One-Step is independent of that litigation and this decision is not intended to address the judge’s ruling,” the FDA said in a statement.