Health systems are at various stages of developing telehealth and virtual healthcare delivery programs, but competitive and regulatory headwinds could require system leaders to accelerate program growth.
At the Becker's 5th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference in Chicago on Oct. 10, a panel of health system experts discussed the best ideas in telehealth, mobile health and digital transformation. The panelists included St. John's Health CIO Lance Spranger; Vice President and Associate CIO of Stanford Children's Hospital Lisa Grisim, RN, MSN; and Anna Marie Chang, MD, associate professor at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals. Dan Nielsen, founder and president of America's Healthcare Leaders, moderated the panel.
Five key takeaways:
1. Telehealth is a huge focus for Jefferson Health and the system recently reached the 100,000-telehealth visit milestone, including on-demand and direct-to-consumer scheduled visits. Over the past five years, the 14-hospital system has focused on bringing together different strategies and tools to provide the best path forward.
2. At Stanford Children's Health, the key priority has been improving access to care for patients, and telehealth has been an integral part of that strategy. In the past year, the hospital recorded around 3,500 telehealth visits including both primary and specialty care. Over the next year, the health system will consider implementing a virtual urgent care program so patients in other states will have access to the hospital's experts. Stanford Children's also has a strategy around home monitoring for patients with type 1 diabetes and single ventricle patients; it hopes to expand the program to low-risk obstetric patients next year as well.
3. St. John's has implemented a mobile healthcare and telehealth strategy as part of its digital transformation. The system treats patients locally as well as secondary markets that can be two hours away; telehealth allows patients to stay at their hometown clinic but still access clinicians at St. John's. The health system recently added rehab consults for surgical patients post-discharge so they don't have to return to the physical hospital for services. St. John's has trained more than 700 providers to deliver telehealth, and a majority of the visits occur because the providers recommend that to patients.
4. A big obstacle to telehealth is finding the best way to support patients as well as providers. When rolling out a program, taking a high-touch approach can be time consuming but gets the ball rolling to ensure the initial providers are comfortable with telehealth and then scale up. Then the challenge becomes providing high-touch support for a large number of providers with a lean support team.
5. Amazon and Sam's Club are now doing virtual clinics and home visits for their employees and that will likely move forward telehealth initiatives as patients become familiar with it and expect that type of service. CMS is also pushing telehealth visits, which places pressure on health systems to develop a great program.
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