Telehealth is widely successful in the areas of stroke management, mental health care and primary care consultations for remote patients.
So it should come as no surprise that telehealth is now used by more than 70 percent of healthcare providers, according to recent industry estimates.
Yet telehealth’s greatest potential lies in its ability to impact multiple patient demographics — beyond stroke management and other high-acuity cases. A growing number of healthcare leaders understand this potential, and are now trying to determine how to scale their organizations’ existing telehealth programs to impact low-acuity, post-acute and non-emergent care.
This is, however, easier said than done. To transition single-use telehealth applications into system-wide endeavors requires a high level of collaboration between healthcare departments and technology leaders. Often, healthcare IT departments that attempt to scale their telehealth systems in-house may find themselves with massively competing priorities with everything from EHR integration efforts to accommodating user preferences while maintaining HIPAA compliance.
Administering a telehealth program comes with unique challenges. For example, a third of telehealth visits occur over Saturday and Sunday. That means 30 percent of support requests may also take place during that time. With IT staff already stretched in multiple directions, this may be too much to bear without outside help.
Working with outside vendors that specialize in enterprise telehealth implementation can help healthcare organizations avoid the bulk of those challenges. A strong collaborative relationship between a healthcare organization’s IT department and an established telehealth vendor can ensure a smoother implementation experience, less pushback from other departments and even better patient engagement.
However, creating right strategic partnership with an outside vendor can be easier said than done.
Addressing Concerns
Even though the potential benefits of successful system-wide telehealth implementations are well understood, healthcare IT departments aren’t always ready to embrace outside vendors.
One of biggest concerns comes from a security standpoint. HIPAA concerns are strong as security threats are ever-evolving. Over the last decade, several major hospitals and health systems have suffered stiff monetary consequences (and reputation damage) when patient data was unintentionally exposed.
This concern feeds into another challenge, that of IT departments wanting to create clinical systems that mimic their organizations’ enterprise systems.
This approach comes with problems, as enterprise and clinical environments have their own distinct needs and parameters. Case in point: At an enterprise level, remote workers are accustomed to using a secure VPN to access a network. But at the clinical level, physicians using telehealth platforms interface with patients in varied environments — hospitals, homes, urgent care clinics, etc. — with dozens of potential proprietary technologies.
Most hospitals go above and beyond in an effort to provide excellent care for patients — so their energies and resources should be centered on saving lives. A healthcare system’s IT department is not always equipped to deal with multiple end users and devices outside their core networks. Outsourcing the burden of managing multiple telehealth connections frees up IT to focus on other projects and priorities. It also helps hospitals avoid the inherent risks of trying to create secure, integrated telehealth solutions that can be leveraged across an entire system.
Aligning for Success
Every healthcare organization’s path to a system-wide telehealth strategy is different. However, there are certain best practices that are consistently used by organizations whose collaboration between IT leaders and telehealth vendor partners have yielded great results. These include:
• Understanding telehealth’s benefits. Healthcare leaders set on scaling their telehealth programs need to be able to back up their decisions, by explaining how system-wide telehealth fits into a greater vision for outcomes-driven, value-based care. Using data to “sell” the benefits of more telehealth can help to underscore the importance of system-wide implementation (e.g., a March 2017 report by the Rural Broadband Association estimated that the median U.S. hospital cost savings per medical facility resulting from a telehealth program is $20,841).
• Letting IT lead the vetting process. No one knows a healthcare system’s technology systems better than the IT department. They should be asking the tough questions:
o Can the vendor accommodate a facility’s specific needs?
o Is the vendor compliant with established security protocols?
o Does the vendor have a track record of system-wide telehealth integrations? Consulting third-party reports by market research groups such as KLAS could help in the vetting process, too.
• Encouraging input. System-wide implementation of any technology involves everyone in a healthcare organization. For this reason, representatives from a healthcare organization’s clinical, IT, and business teams should be invited to meet with third-party vendors to discuss concerns and ask questions before implementation begins. While this may seem obvious, we’ve heard of situations where hospital leadership made contractual decisions with little input from other departments, and ended up fostering employee resentment. When everyone has a chance to voice concerns, a system-wide project is more likely to move forward with fewer road bumps.
• Meeting regularly. In our experience, the most successful system-wide telehealth implementations involve weekly meetings between IT teams and vendors to look at what’s working and what’s not. When healthcare organizations and outside vendors meet on a regular basis, they can ensure that user issues are nipped in the bud before said issues mushroom into enormous problems.
• Having clear metrics and success criteria. Deploying new technology to outside user groups is inevitably difficult, and fine-tuning the experience requires patience. Successful deployments tend have pre-established success criteria and clear metrics to track improvement. This helps IT teams justify their investment and show progress as new programs expand.
Partnering with an outside vendor to implement system-wide telehealth isn’t a decision that can be made overnight. It will involve buy-in and cooperation from multiple stakeholders in an organization.
But by focusing on relationship development and addressing concerns upfront, especially those of IT leaders, a healthcare organization will be able to focus more of its energies on leveraging telehealth in new ways.
Mike Baird is CEO and co-founder of Avizia, which partners with providers to deploy and power system-wide telehealth.
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