"In addition, the beauty of virtual care is that it eliminates geographic and location-specific requirements. "That's an option that did not exist before the pandemic," she continued. "With our virtual care platform, they could work from home, continuing to see patients if they were able to do so. "For instance, we actually had several physicians who were quarantined and unable to conduct in-person clinic visits," Muro recalled. They were thinking, "How will this impact clinic appointments? Will it impact my relationship with the patient?" But soon after launching the telehealth platform, El Camino saw greater acceptance of the value of virtual care, especially in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. Initially, physicians were skeptical of virtual care. Healthcare IT News published a special report highlighting many of these vendors with detailed descriptions of their products. There are many vendors of telemedicine technology and services on the health IT market today. The Amwell platform has the bandwidth to easily connect patients and providers to one another, regardless of where they were located, she said. "Additionally, we needed a highly secure platform that did not put us at risk for privacy, security or compliance challenges," she continued.įurther, connectivity was critical. "We wanted a healthcare-specific platform that would integrate well with our EHR so that patients could see their records during the visit and so physicians could kick off their visit in a professional way. "The easy solution would have been to pick a platform that leveraged virtual meeting technology, but we wanted more than that," she said. "Care delivery options included urgent care, primary care, behavioral health services and chronic care management."Įl Camino also was seeking a technology that could support what Muro calls high-reliability care. "Once the visit was ready to take place, patients would be taken to a two-way video screen where they could talk with a provider through a secure, HIPAA-compliant connection," she continued. "The app would allow them to select a physician or healthcare provider from a menu according to the provider's availability and then connect to that provider. "Under the proposed plan, patients would download an app on their smartphone or other digital device and use it to request a virtual visit," Muro explained. It's a system that would provide 24/7 support for physicians, patients and business units using the Amwell Medical Group. The platform and the training staff provided gave the hospital the agility to rapidly meet patients' changing needs.īefore the implementation, El Camino Hospital's work with Amwell was designed to offer a full-spectrum telehealth system that would support virtual, on-demand physician services across the continuum of care. "From there, we worked to train our physicians on telehealth so we could offer scheduled virtual visits with physicians in our clinics, an initiative that naturally followed in our progression toward a full virtual visit program," she added.Įl Camino found that with the right infrastructure in place, it could stand up virtual care offerings quickly as various needs arise. "Instead, we were able to leverage our relationship to stand up a 24-hour urgent care offering through our virtual provider within days. "If we hadn't done that prep work and had a relationship with a telehealth vendor in place, it would have been much more challenging," she noted. Muro received a call from the CEO: "Could you stand up a COVID-19 virtual visit offering tomorrow?" We selected Amwell as our telehealth vendor and planned to initiate implementation during the first quarter of 2020." "But we knew we needed to skate to where the puck was going. "If you were to look at the statistics at that time, just 1% of visits across the nation were performed virtually," she remarked. In 2019, when the organization launched a selection process for a telehealth vendor, Muro said it was difficult to talk with executives about why the hospital needed a virtual care platform. "But it also adds a higher level of intensity to meeting patients' needs in a more immediate way and with the best solutions available."īefore the pandemic hit in March 2020, El Camino had moved in the direction of telehealth, but virtual care was still a tool the hospital did not yet have. "On the one hand, I love it: It sharpens us and helps us get better," she said. So there is an expectation for tech-enabled healthcare.ĭeborah Muro, CIO at El Camino Hospital, actually would receive calls from leaders of high-tech companies asking why the hospital had not adopted a tech-enabled care system. El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, California, is located near Silicon Valley, home to self-driving cars and robots that deliver food.
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