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Hello ,

This week I’m starting a series of articles to continue over the next few weeks to explore the seven different levels of telehealth maturity and how to move from one maturity level to the next.

As we wrap up 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 health crisis, with 2021 and a vaccine on the horizon, it’s evident that telehealth, as a care delivery tool, is certainly here to stay. Now it’s time to pay more close attention to it and to leverage the learnings and more systematically increase the maturity of a telehealth program.

If anything, 2021 will bring more stability and with it more maturity with it. 2020 has been a year full of experiences and if we translate the experiences into lessons learned, our resilience will be larger for it.

As we launch into December, I wish you a safe, healthy, harmonious pre-holiday season.


Yours in vigilant improvement,

P.S.: Do you know a colleague who might enjoy reading this newsletter? Please send them this link to see an archive of past newsletters and an opportunity to subscribe:
The Telehealth Community presents:
Telehealth Care Delivery:
Beyond the Walls of the Hospital
Thursday, December 3 ⬥ 12 PM - 1 PM Eastern


Changes in health care delivery and technology have extended care beyond the walls of the hospital. Acute care in the home addresses factors patients care most about: convenience, cost, and personalization. To provide this innovative, accessible care model, healthcare organizations should consider implementing technology-assisted solutions that enable in-home acute care delivery. This session will explore new approaches in care delivery, with specific examples of products and how they are used to make acute care in the home a successful reality.

Speakers:
Erkan Hassan, Pharm.D, Founder & President, Transformational Views Consulting Group, Inc.
Karsten Russell-Wood, Portfolio Leader, Acute & Home, Philips

 
The 7 Levels of Telehealth Maturity
Telehealth has been launched at virtually every healthcare organization in the wake of the Covid-19 health crisis. While some initially treated it as a convenient backup solution, most have by now realized that telehealth is here to stay. But how do you make it better? What is needed to fully leverage telehealth’s potential? Enter the 7 Levels of Telehealth Maturity, your roadmap to telehealth success.

On Maturity

Usually we consider something fully mature when it has reached its highest level of potential. Yet often we equate maturity with age. While it is true that to achieve a certain level of maturity, we need to let some time pass, simply getting older does not mean we are getting more mature, because maturity comes from experience, not from age.

And therein lies the opportunity of telehealth maturity. While the process of progressing through the different levels of maturity is mostly sequential, it can be accelerated if you have a good map.

The 7-level Ingenium Telehealth Maturity Model is a representation of the various stages of maturity that healthcare organizations typically progress through on the way to the highest form of maturity: transformative. While one may be able to skip certain stages, it is important to learn and understand the lessons of each stage. Since maturity comes from experience it can also not simply be learned or taught: the organization has to actually live through the experiences to truly understand the lessons to be learned at each stage.

But rather than experiencing aimlessly, a maturity model provides a map, a sequence of increasing levels of maturity that can guide the learner to the next level.

On Maturity Models

Over the past decades, I have used a number of maturity models: starting in the 1990s with the Capability Maturity Model to describe software development processes, to a home-grown project management maturity model, a requirements engineering maturity model and now to a telehealth maturity model.

The Ingenium Telehealth Maturity Model comprises 7 levels — from 0 to 6 — ranging from chaotic, emerging and coordinated to supported, integrated, strategic and transformative.

While the maturity model may seem very formal and only applicable to large organizations, it actually is very scalable. It can be applied to single-speciality physician clinics, urgent care centers or behavioral health providers as well as rural and regional health systems or academic medical centers.

For the purpose of this discussion we’re describing the maturity levels from the perspective of a health system with designated leadership and support teams.

The 7 Levels of Telehealth Maturity

Level 0 — Chaotic: At this level telehealth services are launched ad hoc and at times reactionary without much thought given as to the financial or clinical viability of the service. In larger organizations there is no coordination between the different telehealth services.

Level 1 — Emerging: Eventually “word gets out” that different physicians or teams are using telehealth. Leadership is aware at some level and someone in IT is providing some technical support. Financial sustainability is typically expected or anticipated but seldom measured.

Level 2 — Coordinated: This level is characterized by coordination and communication between the different telehealth services. Leadership is typically supportive telehealth, but does not provide designated resources for support. Success is still mostly a function of few individuals’ passion for making telehealth happen.

Level 3 — Supported: At this level, a central support team (oftentimes comprising part-time assigned resources) is established with support by leadership. There is operational and technical support as well as formal support for the piloting and launch of new services. At this level attention is also paid to reimbursement and regulatory compliance.

The “Supported” maturity level is the one that in the wake of the Covid-19 health crisis most health systems are striving toward. The next three maturity levels literally take telehealth “to the next level”, in the sense of how telehealth is being regarded by administrative and by clinical leadership and in turn by the whole organization.

Level 4 — Integrated: Once a centralized support team with best practices can manage the proper launch of new services, telehealth can quickly spread across all specialties and all modalities - whether to offer patients access to specialty care or integrating remote patient monitoring services. From a patient’s perspective, receiving care online across a spectrum of services is seamless. Finally, clinical data generated during telehealth visits or remotely collected is available for clinical decision making in the patient’s medical record.

Level 5 — Strategic: At the strategic level, organizations are fully leveraging telehealth by proactively using the launch of new telehealth services and the expansion of existing services to drive the fulfillment of their overall organizational strategic objectives. Engaging with patients at a distance and in person is the organization’s “new normal”.

Level 6 — Transformative: At the top maturity level, healthcare organizations are redefining care delivery by creating innovative care delivery models including virtual hospitals. Where necessary, transformative organizations design and develop their own telehealth solutions to meet their innovative needs. The organization is on a continuous pursuit of constantly reviewing and improving its telehealth capabilities and moving towards enabling “Empowered Wellness” for its patients by truly delivering connected care.

Using the Model

To use the model, as with any road map, you first need to assess where the organization is at, so you know where to go from here. Once an assessment of “you are here” is made, you can identify the gaps to get all aspects of one maturity level implemented.

For example we are currently working with one health system that has had most elements of the “2-Coordinated” level in place and some elements of the “3-Supported” level. Our goal in working with the organization is to fill in the missing elements (such as a designated technical support) so we can take their telehealth program to Level 4, Integrated.

Looking Ahead

Over the next few weeks I will be publishing additional articles on the Telehealth Program Maturity Model with more specifics particularly on the core “milestone” levels 3 and 4.

Where would you put your organization’s maturity level? When do you think you’ll reach level 4 or level 5?
To receive articles like these in your Inbox every week, you can subscribe to Christian’s Telehealth Tuesday Newsletter.

Christian Milaster optimizes Telehealth Services for health systems and physician practices as Interim Telehealth Program Director. Christian is the Founder and President of Ingenium Digital Health Advisors where he and his expert consortium partner with healthcare leaders to enable the delivery of extraordinary care. Contact Christian by phone or text at 657-464-3648, via email, or video chat.

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This edition of Telehealth Tuesday was sent to _t.e.s.t_@example.com.
Ingenium Consulting Group, Inc., 1173 Bayview Vis, Annapolis, MD 21409, United States
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