Building a new bridge for healthcare consumers #COVID19
If you cannot get access to a healthcare provider now, how will you get care?
For many years now, all of us in healthcare have believed that virtual health technologies can do wonders, but we always struggled to prove the value drivers for the time-consuming and labor-intensive technology infrastructure investments, always unsure about the ROI of virtual care. When I graduated from college searching for a tech-focused career, I was not aware of the value that technology brings to healthcare.
Fast forward to today, I have been fortunate to work over the past 17 years at four amazing employers in the U.S., who have enabled me to serve many large health systems and integrated delivery networks (IDNs) in enterprise technology strategy and implementations.
Today, as a healthcare IT leader, I have learned that consumers can take charge of their healthcare through technology and will benefit from increased access, lower costs, higher quality, early diagnosis, reduced ED visits/hospital stays, reduced unnecessary visits/tests and enhanced disease prevention/management.
Why does this matter now more than ever? We can bring access to healthcare anytime, anywhere, to anyone through the concept of virtual care, e-health or tele-health during this global COVID crisis and beyond – tele-health is here to stay. What happens if we do not offer tele-health? We as healthcare consumers would be at a disadvantage.
Let’s start this conversation in my home country, India. Several years ago, my husband Hemang Desai and I launched our charity Ray of Hope International Foundation to be able to make a difference through healthcare, tech empowerment and education in India and the United States. To date, we have served 120,000 lives a year for the last nine years. In 2019, when we found a great e-health partner called Karma Healthcare led by Jagdeep Gambhir to bring healthcare access to rural areas in India through telehealth, it opened my eyes. Through just one clinic staffed by only one nurse connected to 15+ on-call tele-health providers digitally (PCPs and specialists), we have seen 1,100+ patients in six months and aim to serve 35,000 people a year in a village called Lasadiya in Rajasthan, India, where there is no other quality healthcare provider. Without tele-health, these villagers with very little income (and no private mode of transportation) would have to miss work and travel one whole day using over-crowded public transportation to a big city, sit in congested hospitals in long queues to access costly healthcare (if they are lucky enough to be even seen by a provider).
Similarly, there are underprivileged/under-served areas all over the world with little or no healthcare, let alone test kits for COVID-19. How will people get tested? Even beyond COVID-19, how will these individuals ever see a provider?
Now coming back to the U.S. ….at UHS my current amazing employer, that operates 400 healthcare facilities (acute care, ambulatory and behavioral health facilities across the country), I have had the opportunity to help launch a tele-health program specifically to help our providers connect with our patients remotely during the COVID-19 crisis. How is this making a difference?
Let’s think about what patients will do in these scenarios:
· What will patients do when they need to be seen for COVID-19 screening/triage prior to going in for a test?
· What will patients do when they need to be seen for other reasons but cannot physically go to their doctor’s clinic, urgent care, or behavioral health professional and wish to avoid the ED?
· Even beyond COVID-19, let’s think about the convenience factor for non-emergent care for the young and the old, for the chronically ill as well as the healthy, in addition to remote monitoring use cases. What can bring providers and patients together much easily on demand – how can we do that?
These patients can now leverage tele-health tools to receive care by a provider. Most importantly, now more than ever we do not want to crowd our EDs with patients with slight symptoms. We need to give higher acuity care to the most critically ill patients and maximize this opportunity to provide virtual visits for the rest of the population. This is not an easy task. With leadership direction, support and engagement, we have now successfully launched a tele-health program connecting our providers and patients across multiple states. We are also excited to see the power of this technology in our Behavioral Health Division where patients can easily seek mental health support from the comfort and safety of their home.
As stated by my former employer PwC’s Healthcare Research Institute in the latest COVID-19 article, 86% of employers offered a tele-health benefit in 2019 and tele-health is creating more access to traditional and mental healthcare providers. Source: PwC - COVID-19: Six things health organizations should be considering (but might not be).
According to the global healthcare leader of PwC, Kelly Barnes, “Tele-health is a technology that is truly breaking down barriers in health systems around the globe. Not only does it have the ability to span geography, bridge expertise to under-served communities and lower the cost of delivering care, we are now learning it can be a crucial access point when disasters and pandemics strike."
Some other examples of tele-health or virtual care in the industry:
Dr. Anuja Dokras at the University of Pennsylvania Health System Women’s Program says, “Currently our offices are closed for all regular visits so tele-health provides us the opportunity to continue to offer non-urgent care to our patients. A large number of our visits include reviewing results and counselling regarding next steps. This can be done effectively via video visits. Even after the COVID 19 crisis, tele-visits are here to stay. There are several opportunities including preventive care (e.g. nutritional visits), therapy (e.g. psychologists) and medical counselling that can be offered without the patient needing to take time off work or spend money on parking.”
Dr. Shiva Chandrasekharan from Einstein Healthcare Network says, “We have changed to almost all tele-health visits for routine primary care. Our patients are truly appreciative of being able to access care while staying safe during this COVID-19 outbreak.”
Lastly, let’s think about the disabled community in Philadelphia served by an incredible organization called Inglis and I am honored to serve on their board. As Dyann Roth, CEO of Inglis indicates, “We have been dramatically increasing the use of tele-health in both our community-based services and in Inglis House, our long-term care wheelchair community. We have expedited the beginning of our "Virtual Visit" pilot to enable our certified peer specialists in the Journeys program to continue to engage with the participants they serve via ipads and a specially-designed app called Mozzazz. In addition, our primary care doctors and specialists serving residents in Inglis House are all now enabled to stay in contact with nursing and with their patients via secure tele-health processes, and have significantly reduced their on-site presence so as to reduce the risk of exposing our medically complex residents to additional sources of the virus.”
Let’s turn to YOU now:
What are your thoughts about tele-health and virtual care? Would you try it as a consumer yourself? If you are a clinician or a healthcare professional, do you believe this can help reduce provider burnout and increase access & convenience to consumers?