🔹 From Remote Care to Virtual Care Management #Covid19 [Telehealth Tuesday]

Hello ,

In this week’s article we’ll be looking ahead a few weeks from now, i.e., not where the puck is (coping with the limitations of telemedicine in the context of prolonged physical distancing) but where the puck will be.

While many healthcare organizations are in the throes of launching and optimizing their telemedicine services (though we are seeing some of our clients smoothly getting back to 90%+ of pre-covid visit volumes by fully leveraging telemedicine), in this week’s article, we want to give you a little bit “food for thought” about the weeks and months ahead.

As the healthcare crisis continues to last, it is becoming increasingly obvious that we need to shift our focus beyond the transactional “video visit” to a more longer-term sustainable “care management at a distance approach” or “virtual care management”.

We are currently working with a number of clients across multiple specialties (e.g., primary care, dermatology, physical therapy, orthopedics, substance use counseling, behavioral counseling, etc.) and are already setting the stage for finding solutions to continue care at a distance in ever-increasing efficacious ways.

Let us know how we can help you and your organization accelerate the adoption of your telehealth services and transition you to a longer-term virtual care management mindset and service model. We’re available for virtual meetings about approaches to your most urgent challenges. Schedule your complimentary session here: https://calendly.com/cmilaster/letsconnect.

With kind regards,

Free Resources
Telehealth and Covid-19

Weekly Open Forums: Access to Ingenium’s Telehealth Experts
Initiated by a German engineer who spent 12 years at the Mayo Clinic improving healthcare delivery, Ingenium Healthcare Advisors is a consortium of 11 pragmatic advisors each with decades of experience in healthcare delivery, particularly the implementation of telehealth solutions. We bring the deep and broad expertise in telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, eICU, telehealth technology, regulatory, legislative, billing, marketing, change management, etc.

As a service to our colleagues in the industry, we are offering free Open Forums for healthcare practitioners and leaders to get their questions about telehealth answered and receive pragmatic advice on best practices when standing up a new telemedicine service quickly.

You can register here:
http://tiny.cc/ing-th-cov19-sessions

MGMA Webinar: Rapidly Launching, then Optimizing Telehealth
As practices respond to new telehealth legislation amidst #COVID19, effective implementation processes, while crucial, can prove overwhelming.

In this 1-hour webinar, hosted by the MGMA, now available on demand, Christian Milaster and Kathy Letendre of Ingenium Digital Health will share key steps for rapid launch, as well as optimization strategies to ensure that your services are clinically and financially sound in this quickly evolving healthcare climate:

Register here for free access to this webinar:
https://www.mgma.com/resources/continuing-education/products/standing-up-a-telehealth-practice-in-the-covid-(2)

MGMA Podcast:
COVID19: What Healthcare Leaders Need To Know About Telehealth and the CMS Policy Changes
Listen to an interview of Christian Milaster and Kathy Letendre recorded by the MGMA, published on March 20 (our part starts at 14:45 minutes).

Contact Us
To schedule a complimentary Zoom call to find out how we can best help you and your organization, email Christian at christian.cv@ingeniumdigitalhealth.com or call 657-464-3648.

It is now pretty clear to most of us, that social distancing (whether mandated or voluntary) is here to stay for many months. Especially those patients at a higher risk of a coronavirus infection causing harm to them, will be very likely to remain at home as much and as long as possible.

In the early days of our healthcare systems’ response to the Coronavirus in the middle of March 2020, many organizations were rapidly standing up hastily acquired technical capabilities to connect with patients at a distance, a.k.a. “Remote Care”. That is to say that the capabilities of these services for some clinician/patient interactions fell short of “Telemedicine” which we define as “practicing medicine at a distance”.

While payors refer to this type of care enabled by live audio/video as “telemedicine”, most healthcare organizations’ initial (or current) offerings merely facilitated a conversation with the patient, with varying degrees of success to truly “practice medicine”.

Which is exactly what was needed in the early days of our response to social distancing — the ability to quickly connect with patients to “see” how they were doing and help them with their imminent challenges, medication refills, etc.

Now that we’re over 4 weeks into social distancing in most parts of the country, we are realizing that social distancing will stay with us for a long time until we have a vaccine, treatment, and sufficient testing.

Which means that the mindset of healthcare administrators and clinical leaders in healthcare delivery organizations needs to focus now on planning and preparing for how we can care for those patients that need access to care but who can’t or don’t want to come into the clinic in months to come.

Or said in other words: to focus on quickly evolving from “Remote Care” to “Practicing Medicine at a Distance” and then to Virtual Care Management.

In US healthcare, we rely for our diagnosis and evaluation of treatment efficacy very heavily on data such as the patient’s most recent vitals and the results of tests such as labs, x-rays or EKGs. Any of those are these days very difficult to obtain.

While a secure, live audio/video telehealth visit can provide much more information than a simple phone call or text messaging, its ability to collect actionable data from the patient about the patient is still very limited.

Before considering technical solutions, what is mostly needed is a mindset shift away from “transactional” visits week after week to a more mid- and long-term oriented approach to keeping shelter-in-place patients safe. What is furthermore needed is access to scalable, affordable technical solutions to acquire the data that clinicians, rightfully, are so accustomed to obtaining.

Tailored Solutions

One of the 6 common misconceptions about telehealth is that “one size fits all”, that one telehealth solution can address all the needs of all clinicians for all patients. That belief is a fallacy often promoted by IT which sees it as its role to limit the number of technical solutions it has to license and support.

What is needed is a collection, an arsenal of fine-tuned service offerings readily at the disposal of clinicians, that can bring the care to the broad spectrum of patient populations your organization, your clinicians are serving.

The populations that over the next months will most greatly benefit from telemedicine services that are geared toward them include the chronically ill, the high utilizers, and those affected by the deferred elective surgeries.

Each of these populations — and subsets within each population — will require different solutions. For diabetics we want to get reliable blood sugar readings. For those with CHF or COPD, having good blood pressure and even pulse ox data would greatly increase the clinicians ability to “practice medicine at a distance”. Patients with deferred hip replacements need a different level of care than those waiting for a carpal tunnel repair or an ablation/cardioversion.

Another driver for the need of “Virtual Care Management” is to take the concepts of population health management and the patient-centered medical home into the new “at a distance” world as well.

Transition to Virtual Care Management

So what is an organization to do? Well, first things first.

To build clinicians' confidence in telemedicine, an organization must first ensure that clinicians are highly satisfied with the processes, the policies, and the technology. You need to evolve from Remote Care (“connecting with patients”) to telemedicine (“practicing medicine”) by using creative, innovative approaches and, oftentimes, community resources to overcome the limitations of care at a distance.

Then, and only then, can you bring multi-disciplinary teams together to identify ways to treat your most vulnerable, most sick, and most at-risk populations safely and efficaciously at a distance. And set the stage to evolve from Remote Care to Virtual Care Management.