by Michalene Kinsler | Jun 15, 2021 | Telehealth, Long Term Care, Senior Care, Telemedicine
Experiences from COVID, Use Cases, and Impact
Given the opportunity to quickly prove its efficacy and customer appetite for connecting with care providers virtually, telehealth has more than proven the model works and works well. There is also consensus in the industry that the former regulatory and reimbursement barriers that were rapidly removed during COVID will not go back to the old normal. Evidence of this keeps emerging with CMS rulings and clarifications that signal this intent. The question for those in Senior and Long-Term Care who are now looking at their post-pandemic clinical, operational and business environment to make IT strategy decisions is: Where to go next in telehealth and virtual care?
By now, almost all providers have found a way to do virtual visits with the patients and residents they serve. A first step in evaluating your IT strategy for any purpose is to take a critical look at those solutions and workflows you are using with either a full or a targeted assessment. If done well, this assessment should provide you with the necessary insight to confidently map out your short and long term plans based on your current state and an inventory of your telehealth and virtual care capabilities.
This provides the opportunity to determine if you have the capabilities to meet the clinical, technical and operational objectives of your organization. You can examine if there are ways to optimize what you already have and be well positioned for the future.
For many organizations the near term objectives include improving access to care, decreasing the cost of providing care and maximizing reimbursement. Consider if your technology allows you to:
- Meet the new and increased demands on your infrastructure. This includes internet, Wi-Fi, connectedness, and the ability to share the needed data through integrations and interoperability.
- Optimize your processes and workflows. Consider the operations that can and should be automated. Explore any additional customization and training that would lead to better performance.
- Enhance and improve the experience that patients, residents, families, staff and partner organizations have with your organization. Right now, the expectations are especially high and best practices for communication, feedback and recognition have significantly shifted to include having a strong digital presence. Many organizations have moved much of their interactions to a digital or even mobile first model and have rounded out their offerings with quality of life and hospitality elements like wellness programming and education, menus and meals, activities and content that adds value.
- Maximize reimbursement for the clinical services you are providing and plan to provide. Changes to the way some clinical services can be billed could significantly increase the ROI for adding increased telehealth, RPM and CCM capabilities for appropriate use cases. Your IT strategy should help you maximize this revenue capture and enable the services that will be provided going forward.
Consider leveraging people with experience and expertise. Strategic Interests can help your organization with a Telehealth and Virtual Care assessment and strategy. Please contact Michalene Kinsler at mkinsler@strategicinterests.com to schedule an introductory call.
Let us help you put the right technology in place so your organization can focus on delivering care to the people you serve.
by Brett Kinsler | Sep 24, 2020 | Consulting, innovation, Telehealth
First published in New York Medical Group Management Association New York Beat e-newsletter August 2020
In a recent webinar, a colleague showed a slide with a multiple choice question: Who led the digital transformation of your company?
A. CEO
B. CTO
C. COVID-19
Of course, choice C was circled in red. From schools to retail, the coronavirus pandemic has forced us to change how we perform everyday tasks we hardly paid a thought to last autumn. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but COVID is triple espresso she is drinking to fuel her innovation.
Medical practices have been, for quite some time, flirting with the idea of telehealth and more recently with remote patient monitoring. Largely left to large or hospital-owned practices, the idea of treating patients virtually has been seen as more of a Jetsons age novelty than an indispensable resource. But the pandemic has forced many to think differently and act in ways that best serve patients and support the sustainability of the practice. Healthcare has been pushed to elevate the use of technology in order to stay safe, effective, relevant, and viable.
Chances are your practice is now doing some form of telehealth and you were not doing much prior to COVID. It’s likely the implementation of this technology was a disruption for which you weren’t fully prepared. This begs a few questions: What else is on the horizon in healthcare innovation that we may not be expecting? Are there better ways to do what we quickly implemented? Do we need to modify our workflows? Can we better impact outcomes, satisfaction, revenues, or profits by enhancing what we’ve done?
Let’s examine a few of the upcoming transformations you can prepare for to ensure the next major disruption is more of a tremor than a quake to your everyday operations:
The vast majority of healthcare practitioners who have only recently moved into the telehealth space have no intention of reverting. As insurance reimbursement scales to meet the demand, the benefits of using remote communication to treat patients will continue to grow. Wider adoption, increased usage among vulnerable populations, and higher acuity use cases will continue to be evident. Telehealth will be increasingly used to care for patients who are traveling or snowbirds as well as provide more consistent tracking of patients with chronic or complex conditions. The impact of avoiding unnecessary hospital and ED visits will further increase its cost-effectiveness. Patients have come to trust telehealth as a viable alternative and will come to expect the option when making healthcare decisions. Being prepared for this will position your practice as one that is patient centered, and as an employer who can provide flexibility for clinicians who are unable or unwilling to attend in-person visits. Look at the telehealth program you may have implemented as a result of COVID. Are there ways to strengthen the system to shift into a more permanent and integrated one?
- Advances in Wearables and Remote Patient Monitoring
Once only sported by early adopters and elite athletes, the age of Apple Watches and Fitbits is now is full swing. The technology is improving, easier to clinically incorporate and capture into EHRs in a meaningful and actionable way. Advantages of getting accurate readings for, say, blood pressure or blood glucose between clinical encounters provides more frequent touchpoints, faster feedback about interventions, and earlier warning for trends and impending events. This new stream of data can help increase revenues, enhance patient outcomes, reduce operations costs, and enhance patient experiences. Technology improvements in cardiac monitoring and other metrics are advancing rapidly and this evolution means you will not be bombarded with a flood of data but only values that will help in making decisions. If you’re not currently thinking about how to incorporate wearable data into your daily workflow, you should be.
- Enhancing the Patient Experience with Digital Health Apps
In addition to adopting telehealth and remote monitoring to engage patients between encounters, innovative practices are also adopting a myriad of other tools and capabilities to enhance the patient experience. Enabling patients to find a doctor, schedule an appointment, message their provider, pay their bill, get directions, rate their experience, report how they feel, confirm compliance, get educational content, and access their clinical record from their smartphone can significantly enhance their perception of providers. While many of these functions can be addressed individually, providers will find more patient satisfaction and retention if they deploy comprehensive, integrated apps that provide a single point of access for all of these functions.
Senior living facilities have been using VR in the treatment of memory care. Experiences from the past can feel fully immersive and trigger memories, conversations and new mental connections. VR is increasingly being used by surgeons to visualize complex surgery and improve interventions by superimposing virtual images over the actual patient. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible in this arena. Stay tuned for the near future of VR applications that will be useful in your everyday workflow.
Advances in technology are but one piece of the puzzle you need to stay ahead of an ever-evolving healthcare landscape. To survive and thrive, it is necessary to stay flexible and informed. Don’t wait for the next pandemic to embrace the inevitable, assess your situation and create a roadmap for your future. In the end, we all want to provide the highest quality care for our patients and adopting useful and meaningful technology can help to do exactly that.
by Michalene Kinsler | Sep 21, 2020 | Telehealth, Telemedicine
Telehealth and Virtual Care continues to be a focus of delivering safe, effective care during COVID and a cornerstone of addressing issues of access for rural and underserved populations.
As part of the CARES Act, $200 million was designated for telehealth programs and was quickly awarded to both large and small providers in an effort to rapidly increase the availability of virtual visits, remote monitoring and other types of connected care.
Continuing with that focus, the FCC will make funding available through the Universal Service Fund (USF) as the Connected Care Pilot Program (Pilot Program) to help defray the costs of providing connected care services. The emphasis on supporting these services will be for low-income Americans and Veterans. The Pilot Program will make available up to $100 million available over a three-year funding period and will be separate from the budgets of the existing Universal Service Fund (USF) programs.
For those projects that are selected, the Pilot Program will cover 85% of the eligible costs of
(1) patient broadband internet access services
(2) health care provider broadband data connections
(3) other connected care information services, and
(4) certain network equipment (e.g., equipment necessary to make a supported broadband service function such as routers)
Unlike the FCC Covid Telehealth Program, this will not fund end-user devices or medical equipment and will require a competitive bidding process. The intention is to address a wide variety of health challenges such as diabetes management, opioid dependency, high-risk pregnancies, pediatric heart disease, mental health conditions, and cancer. Information on eligibility and guidelines is available and the timeline is expected to be released soon. Organizations can submit an eligibility determination ahead of the full announcement – see links at end of this post.
Also in the interest of expanding coverage to rural areas, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report on existing and upcoming efforts to improve rural healthcare. This report, the Rural Action Plan, is the first HHS-wide assessment of rural healthcare efforts in more than 18 years and the product of HHS’s Rural Task Force, a group of experts and leaders across the department first put together by Secretary Alex Azar in 2019.
This action plan provides a roadmap for HHS to strengthen departmental coordination to better serve the millions of Americans who live in rural communities across the United States. Eighteen HHS agencies and offices took part in developing the plan, which includes 71 new or expanded activities for FY 2020 and beyond. Efforts that will be undertaken in FY 2020 include nine new rural-focused administrative or regulatory actions, three new rural-focused technical assistance efforts, 14 new rural research efforts, and five new rural program efforts. These efforts build on 94 new rural-focused projects the HHS Rural Task Force identified as having launched over the past three years.
This report outlines the key challenges facing rural communities related to issues such as emerging health disparities, chronic disease burden, high rates of maternal mortality and limited access to mental health services. The plan lays out a four-point strategy to transform rural health and human services, with a number of actions that can be launched within weeks or months. The four points of the strategy are:
- Building a sustainable health and human services model for rural communities
- Leveraging technology and innovation
- Focusing on preventing disease and mortality
- Increasing rural access to care
More funding through programs like these and improved coordination across agencies and providers could provide the foundation for truly addressing how to deliver care when and where it is needed – especially for those most in need.
For more information:
by Stacey Padginton | May 26, 2020 | Telehealth, Telemedicine
Telehealth has always been viewed as a key pillar of the technology-enabled care delivery… of the future. Each year, we have said “This is the year for Telehealth” and that could not be more true than at the current moment. There is an urgent need for solutions that serve and protect patients and providers at the same time. As we know, Telehealth helps hospitals, health systems, LTC and group practices deliver quality care while gaining efficiency, improving patient care and satisfaction, increasing provider satisfaction, reducing risk and decreasing costs.
As 2020 unfolds, with the COVID-19 pandemic severely testing our health-system capacity, telehealth is providing solutions. Virtual care and remote monitoring have taken centerstage during this crisis. Keeping patients home but engaged is especially important along with tracking the health of employees and their return to work status.
Many of the regulatory and reimbursement constraints that have created barriers to telehealth adoption prior to COVID-19 have been eased. There is increased grant funding available as well. Our hospital systems and other organizations need to leverage technology to deliver care during social distancing efforts to prevent the spread of the virus. Many vendors are offering low cost and deeply discounted plans to help meet these needs.
Finding the right Telehealth vendor to best meet your organization’s needs can still be a challenge. How do you find the right vendor during a crisis? Can you afford the time to research and vet those companies so you don’t make a mistake that costs time and money?
Strategic Interests, LLC has extensive experience and knowledge in Telehealth. SI can help you select a vendor, implement a program, training your staff, and identify revenue and/or funding sources. SI will quickly learn your use cases and requirements and propose appropriate solutions. If you would like to explore how Telehealth could benefit your organization during this unprecedented time, please use the contact us page on our website or email SI at info@strategicinterests.com.
Recent Comments