Category: Telehealth Trends
Telehealth News Roundup: Virtual Care Beyond COVID-19
Amid increased safety precautions, office closures, and crowded hospitals, many patients turned to telemedicine during the COVID-19 crisis. According to data from McKinsey, telehealth use has increased 38x compared to the pre-COVID baseline.
However, as life gradually returns to normal, what will the future of telehealth look like? Will patient demand for virtual visits remain high, or revert to a preference for in-person office visits? Will facilities and insurance plans continue to support virtual care delivery?
In our monthly news recap, we explore how providers, patients, and the government expect to see telehealth evolve beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
U.S. News & World Report
The purpose of telemedicine has always been to care for patients where they are, but it took the explosive rise in demand in 2020 to bring that promise to fruition. While demand has leveled off, it remains much higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic. As life begins to return to normal, what should patients expect from telemedicine? Experts predict that as much as half of care could be delivered remotely — but much of that depends on if and how government regulations allow for the expansion of telehealth services.
American Medical Association
The recently passed Consolidated Appropriations Act includes a provision that guarantees that patients with Medicare will continue to have access to telehealth services for at least five months after the Biden administration declares an end to the nation’s public health emergency. The flexibility of telemedicine has played a vital role in improving patient access to care during the COVID-19 pandemic, and this legislation makes important strides toward permanent expansion of telehealth coverage.
mHealth Intelligence
New data shows that in December 2021, national telehealth use rose by 11.4%. Researchers believe this increase is related to the rise of the COVID-19 Omicron variant around the same time period. Prior to this, telehealth use had showed a slight decline over the second half of 2021 as COVID-19 cases dropped. The same research reveals some of the diagnoses that make up the largest portion of telehealth claims, such as mental health conditions, acute respiratory disease, and hypertension.
UnitedHealth Group
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, many healthcare providers are considering whether and how to continue offering virtual care. According to a recent Optum survey, 93% of providers indicate they want to continue to utilize telemedicine. For many providers, telehealth offers added convenience, although it also comes with frustrations, mainly around setting patient expectations and managing the technical details of virtual visits.
AI and Preventive Care: New Solutions for More Effective Prevention
Preventive care is a pillar of values-based care and a critical element of patient-centered virtual care solutions. Preventive medicine helps patients avoid the onset of illness, slows disease progression, and reduces the chance of developing severe complications.
Preventive interventions reduce unnecessary testing, treatments, and procedures. Interventions involving collaboration between patients, providers, and care management teams can reduce the risk of hospital readmission. Such interventions offer measurable cost savings for hospitals by eliminating readmission fines for Medicare patients.
Advances in augmented intelligence continually provide new solutions for more effective prevention, improved primary care quality, and lower medical costs. AI-driven preventive care can extend life expectancy and improve quality of life in patients living with chronic conditions, including diabetes, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Preventive Analytics Models
Augmented intelligence uses AI algorithms to enhance clinician understanding and decision-making regarding an individual patient. Predictive and prescriptive analytics are designed to enhance prevention and support positive outcomes.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive models use past patient data to identify trends that suggest future outcomes. Machine learning continuously incorporates ongoing patient data to make individual predictions more accurate. Predictive models help clinicians understand risks and potential paths of disease progression and healthcare requirements so they can design more effective care plans.
Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive models look beyond medical history, incorporating cultural, economic, and environmental factors associated with specific health outcomes. These models support provider decision-making with patient-specific recommendations that make interventions more effective. They also offer guidance designed to empower patients in their health management choices.
Medication and Prevention
In chronic conditions, medication adherence directly impacts outcomes, longevity, quality of life, and healthcare costs. Adherence to at-home medication administration is essential in managing diabetes and asthma. Research published in the journal Nature Medicine in 2021 describes a wireless sensor system that uses AI to detect when patients use their insulin pens and inhalers. The system also identifies errors in steps followed for proper administration and flags them so patients can improve their technique.
The study confirmed that the system accurately identified when patients used an insulin pen (99%) or inhaler (97%). The results also show accuracy in detecting missing steps and inaccurate duration of administration.
Care Management
Virtual care innovations have the potential to elevate patient engagement and care management. Augmented intelligence provides solutions that increase participation in disease management programs and customize care management options.
A 2019 study conducted by McKinsey & Company revealed that in-depth analytics tools can help care managers recognize patterns associated with negative outcomes and higher healthcare costs.
The McKinsey model identified a connection between poor medication adherence and increased ER visits in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. Machine learning algorithms then identified patterns associated with willingness to change behavior to improve health.
Those insights help care managers implement targeted interventions to increase medication adherence. Patient-specific guidance for intervention delivery, such as optimal times, frequency, and communication methods (phone calls, email, text), also boost patient compliance.
Preventive Diagnostics
Diagnostic AI models analyze symptoms to assist providers in accurately diagnosing health conditions. Diagnostic analytics are most commonly used in diagnosing patients who already present with concerning symptoms. However, AI enables diagnostics to play a larger role in preventive medication.
Innovations in preventive diagnostic models can detect serious conditions in their earliest stages, in some cases earlier and more accurately than standard health screenings.
Medial EarlySign, an Israeli company focused on AI healthcare solutions, developed a machine-learning model to diagnose non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) earlier than exiting methods. According to research published in 2021 in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, this model outperformed standard NSCLC screening protocols.
Early confirmation of an NSCLC diagnosis provides the highest chance of effective treatment and reduces the risk of dying from lung cancer. Considering that NSCLS currently has a life expectancy of just five years past diagnosis, Medial EarlySign could dramatically change what this diagnosis means for patients and families.
Patient monitoring
New advances in AI have placed image-signal processing techniques in the foreground of remote vital signs monitoring. Simple cameras can provide enough digital data for leading-edge machine learning to accurately monitor heart and respiratory rates, blood oxygen levels, and blood pressure.
Like wearable sensors, image-based AI can identify risk factors in real-time, enabling early interventions that help prevent declining health and adverse patient events. However, smartphone solutions, such as this software development kit currently pursuing FDA approval, have advantages over wearables, including lower costs and simplified user interfaces.
Care facilities can utilize in-room cameras to monitor patient vital signs. A 2021 paper exploring contactless, image-based monitoring of hospitalized COVID-19 patients describes AI and machine learning applied to images captured by ordinary cameras. Such platforms detect barely perceptible changes in skin color and subtle body movements to measure vital signs and identify abnormal patterns associated with negative health trajectories.
Conclusion
Preventive analytics have far-reaching potential for value-based healthcare. However, like all technology, they do carry some risk. Ongoing development must continue to address issues arising from inadequate or corrupted datasets, technical and user errors, and over-reliance by providers. Raw data and human bias can compromise prescriptive models, undermining the goal of health equity.
Proactive developers and other stakeholders are working to correct these issues. Nevertheless, providers must remember that AI tools support, but do not replace, clinical experience, knowledge, and critical reasoning skills.
Combining precision AI with provider expertise, however, has already caused a shift in the healthcare industry. As the technology continues to evolve, patients and providers will continue to experience the transformative benefits of augmented intelligence.
Caregility uses data analytics to provide robust decision support for providers in acute settings across the care continuum. Our award-winning, HIPAA-certified, interoperable platform connects all stakeholders, optimizing patient engagement, care delivery options, and clinician workflows. To learn more about how our virtual care platform enhances preventive care, contact us today.
Telehealth News Roundup: Strategies to Combat Hospital Labor Shortages
If COVID-19 weren’t enough of a challenge, hospitals and healthcare systems face significant labor shortages. Some healthcare workers are switching jobs for higher pay and better benefits, while others are choosing to leave the industry completely.
To maintain appropriate staffing levels and continue to provide high-quality patient care, hospitals must look to implement short- and long-term recruiting and retention solutions.
How can providers better understand and address the ongoing staffing shortages? Our monthly news recap explores the strategies that could combat labor shortages and improve staff recruitment, and retention in 2022.
NurseJournal
There are several key factors contributing to the current nursing shortage: a lack of nurse educators, limited spots in community colleges, and the Great Resignation. However, there are proven strategies—including increasing diversity, prioritizing workplace culture, and adjusting protocols to meet nurses’ needs— that can increase nurse retention. By executing some or all of these strategies, healthcare leaders can positively change the outlook for the future of nursing.
Fierce Healthcare
Experts predict that staffing shortages and increased labor costs will continue to fuel higher expenses and declines in operating cash flow for healthcare systems. According to the American Nurses Association, there will be more than 100,000 registered nursing jobs available annually by next year. Fortunately, there are several factors that may help mitigate the labor shortage in the next year and beyond.
Infection Control Today
In the midst of labor shortages, hospitals are striving to strike the right balance between maintaining the safety of their staff and their ability to function adequately. With this in mind, the CDC recently reduced its recommended isolation time for healthcare workers exposed to COVID-19 from ten to seven days. Despite pushback from nursing organizations, and mixed evidence as to the period of contagion, systems following these recommendations have been able to ease their shortages somewhat, while monitoring the impact on in-house cases.
Becker’s Hospital Review
In response to the ongoing healthcare labor shortage, several hospitals and health systems have made recent investments in recruitment and retention. Initiatives range from millions of dollars in pay increases, bonuses, and benefit enhancements to investments in education and upskilling programs.
Delta, Omicron and Beyond: Trusting in Telehealth to Weather What’s Next
Before the winter holidays, infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm told CNN that the United States could expect a “viral blizzard” due to the COVID-19 Omicron variant coming on the heels of the Delta surge. That prediction has, unfortunately, proven correct. As we entered 2022, new COVID-19 cases were higher than at any previous time during the pandemic.
When Omicron hit the U.S., hospitals in many regions were still reeling from the impacts of the Delta variant. We still have much to learn about Omicron. Although preliminary research indicates that it causes less severe disease than other variants, its highly contagious nature has exacerbated the massive staffing shortages hospitals have dealt with since the Delta surge began in August 2021.
Even as our understanding of Omicron develops, we must face the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic won’t end anytime soon. New variants will continue to emerge. On the other hand, the fast ramp-up of telemedicine triggered by the pandemic helps equip providers and health systems to mitigate future COVID-19 challenges. Moreover, this evolving care model elevates the quality of patient care in general.
Millions of providers and patients have now experienced the benefits of virtual care
Before the pandemic, limited reimbursement for telehealth made providers hesitant to adopt virtual care solutions. As the virus spread across the U.S., providers implemented virtual care as a crisis-driven solution. Public and private payors alike began encouraging and paying for virtual care visits.
Beyond reducing the spread of COVID-19, virtual care took off because it offers many practical benefits. It eliminates travel time and expenses for patients, reduces wait times, and minimizes exposure to other illnesses in waiting rooms. Virtual care boosts efficiency and saves time for providers, especially in hospital settings. When a provider can remotely access the room of a quarantined patient, they don’t need to walk all the way over from another building or take the time to gown and glove. Nursing staff can monitor more patients at the same time without having to travel room to room.
Hybrid care is enhancing outcomes for staff and patients
The rapid advances in technology spurred by the pandemic have created a hybrid model of care that elevates the experience of both patients and staff. Having a virtual care team amplifies bedside care in the hospital. During staffing shortages, hybrid care balances the ratio of patients to nursing staff, so nurses can get to patients faster and address adverse conditions sooner.
Hybrid care also enhances the care team approach. In the past, communication between the care team took place opportunistically. Now, the players in the care team can virtually get to the bedside. It’s not just the nurse, it’s also the telenurse, the therapist, the provider, the specialist. There’s more of a collaborative approach to figuring out the best care plan and the limitations of care, and collaboration is more efficient.
The hybrid model also facilitates the stratification of patients. The virtual care team can provide extra monitoring and bedside assistance to those patients with the highest acuity scores. Likewise, virtual staff can also continue to monitor low-acuity patients for progress towards transfer or discharge, freeing up the bedside care team to focus on the higher-acuity patients.
The hybrid care model also offers more options for caring for quarantined COVID-19 patients, using telenursing to monitor, alert, and intervene, in coordination with the bedside team.
The value of purpose-built virtual care solutions
During the height of the COVID-19 crisis, many hospitals adopted a “band-aid” virtual care approach. This included using tablets, smartphones, baby monitors, and consumer video conferencing platforms for virtual monitoring and visits. While these solutions helped in the short-term, they are not reliable and scalable for the long-term. They weren’t designed for 24/7, always on and available use, nor for the specific security and privacy concerns in hospital settings.
Today, more and more providers and health systems are committing to adopting purpose-built solutions that deliver much better outcomes than these short-term fixes. They understand that they need more than just a camera to bring real value to virtual care delivery.
That value is driving the need for secure, reliable platforms that facilitate all of the different care programs and clinical workflows. Capabilities such as on-demand video calling, continuous video monitoring, multiple participant sessions, and bedside clinical notifications expand virtual care options. Features such as panning and zooming of cameras, adjusting bedside speaker and microphone levels, turning on night vision, refreshing cameras, modulating bandwidth, and adding participants during a call give the remote clinician full control over the virtual care encounter.
Ultimately, telehealth technology should function seamlessly in the background, while the comprehensive platform facilitates the clinical approach. Advanced technology designed under the guidance of clinical care experts is the ideal approach to virtual care that’s easy, efficient, and reliable in any healthcare setting.
Going forward: innovation must focus on frontline staff
Leveraging virtual care to weather the storms of COVID-19 means developing modular solutions that alleviate the burden of overwhelmed emergency departments and understaffed hospitals. Telenursing, proactive monitoring, integrated data science, and offsite virtual staffing are aspects that industry leaders must develop to boost care quality and support clinicians. We owe frontline healthcare workers our deepest gratitude. We must continue to prioritize their needs and act on their input as we move forward.
Caregility’s award-winning, HIPAA-certified, interoperable platform connects patients, family members, interpreters, and clinical teams. Our clinical network partners add care delivery options and our administrative management, data, and analytics provide robust decision support for acute settings across the care continuum.
To learn more about our virtual care platform, contact us today.
This post was contributed by Pete McLain, Caregility’s Chief Strategy Officer. Pete provides leadership to our growing product and solution focus toward improved care models. He is a pioneer, innovator and leader in the field of telehealth video and communications solutions with 20 years of health care experience.
Telehealth News Roundup: Top Predictions for 2022
The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the healthcare industry, contributing to a diminishing workforce, clinician burnout, policy changes, and a renewed call for digital transformation.
While it’s likely that much of 2022 will be spent continuing to address COVID-19 and the newest emerging variants, there are also promising innovations on the horizon that have the potential to enhance patient care and address common challenges across hospitals and health systems.
What can you expect in the new year? Read on for our monthly news recap exploring experts’ predictions for the upcoming year, with a particular focus on the pandemic’s impact on demand for telehealth services.
Healthcare IT News
The healthcare system has been stretched thin by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is continuing to cope with challenges including the delivery of vaccination programs, a diminishing workforce, and an increased demand for digital transformation. In the coming year, the healthcare system will likely face an urgency to develop more sustainable services and therapeutics, adopt health security measures, address workforce scarcity, and make changes to proactively prevent and manage non-communicable diseases.
Grand View Research
Telehealth aims to increase access to basic healthcare, and it has been shown to improve quality of care delivery to patients. As demand for digital health services increases, the U.S. telehealth market is expected to reach $2.83 billion by 2022. This can help reduce hospital visits and re-hospitalizations, enable round-the-clock monitoring, and allow patients to access care from the comfort of their own homes.
Forbes
The COVID-19 pandemic brought incredible challenges to the healthcare industry, but it has also provoked innovative new approaches. As patients looked for alternatives to in-person office visits, for example, the demand for virtual care skyrocketed. As of July 2021, the use of telehealth has increased by 38 times since before the pandemic began. Will this demand wane once the pandemic has passed? The answer may, in part, rely on policies around health plan reimbursements for telehealth services.
MedCity News
Millions of people quit their jobs in 2021, and that mass resignation significantly impacted the healthcare industry. There are no easy fixes for the healthcare labor crisis; however, innovations and advancements in healthcare technology have the potential to lessen the strain on overworked, burnt-out physicians, nurses, and staff. In the coming year, AI-powered tools, telehealth, remote monitoring, and precision medicine can play a role in enhancing patient care and improving the mental, physical, and emotional states of healthcare workers.
What’s HIPAA got to do with it?
COVID-19 changed how America and the world views telehealth.
Many clinicians who had not fully embraced telehealth before the pandemic have come to rely on it for seeing patients. And, likewise, patients who had never tried it before now see the convenience and benefits—and now fully expect it to be available to them.
The necessity of being able to help patients without their having to leave home was the primary driver of telehealth’s growth during the pandemic. However, targeted deregulation and revised reimbursement arrangements also played a role in telehealth’s expansion. In particular, the HHS Office for Civil Rights announced it will exercise its enforcement discretion and not impose penalties against covered healthcare providers for noncompliance with the HIPAA Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification Rules in connection with the good-faith provision of telehealth.
This moratorium on HIPAA compliance has enabled patients and providers to connect over video platforms like Skype; however. these types of platforms can be limited in terms of bandwidth use, other functionality, and regulatory compliance.
HIPAA compliance enforcement can be resumed at any time
Be careful with the makeshift or “temporary” tools you might be using because even though enforcement of HIPAA-compliant telehealth is temporarily constrained, it won’t last forever. In fact, historically, federal oversight agencies have been known to resume enforcement without much warning.
If you have a telehealth solution that’s not designed specifically for healthcare, you might be caught by surprise when the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Civil Rights (OCR) comes knocking. And fixing things overnight won’t be an option. When it comes to technology, getting implementation right can be tricky.
According to OCR’s “FAQs on Telehealth and HIPAA during the COVID-19 nationwide public health emergency,” physicians are temporarily allowed to use non-public-facing technology to conduct telehealth visits, including: Apple FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Whatsapp, Zoom, or Skype.
But, as soon as the temporary reprieve on HIPAA enforcement is lifted, physicians will need a telehealth platform that is purpose-built for healthcare to help ensure HIPAA compliance.
Selecting a telehealth partner that has dedicated experience in healthcare and has built-in technology that help support HIPAA compliance will not only save you time, but also money and headaches down the road. No one wants to face a HIPAA violation or a lawsuit for inadvertently breaching a patient’s privacy rights by using a noncompliant solution. It’s better to adopt a solution now that you won’t have to abandon later.
Preparing for HIPAA-compliant telehealth
Unquestionably, televisits are here to stay. A recent study issued by management consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, says telehealth use now is 38 times higher than before the pandemic. New use cases are proving themselves every month, such as in mental health, triage, during transport, the use of third-party clinical networks, post-discharge monitoring, home health support, and much more.
This makes right now an excellent time to prepare for the ongoing use of telehealth programs—and for HIPAA compliant telehealth solutions.
What is HIPAA-compliant telehealth?
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) does not have specific rules for telehealth. Rather, it requires telehealth to comply with all HIPAA requirements, the same way a healthcare provider would have to comply with an in-person visit.
According to the Center for Connected Health Policy’s fact sheet on HIPAA and telehealth, “HIPAA compliance entails an organized set of secure, monitored, and documented practices within and between covered entities.” No particular product can guarantee HIPAA compliance, but some “may contain elements or features that allow them to be operated in a HIPAA-compliant way,” the Center says.
How to be HIPAA-compliant
Telehealth.org, a leading global telehealth training institute, offers these five key tips for HIPAA-compliant telemedicine:
- Use trusted vendors. Use a telehealth vendor designed specifically for healthcare. For a software provider to be HIPAA compliant, they must have security measures to secure protected health information (PHI) and be willing to sign a business associate agreement (BAA).
- Secure data. Make sure the data security measures of your HIPAA-compliant vendor includes safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of PHI.
- Control access to data. Part of HIPAA compliance is limiting PHI access to the “minimum necessary” required to complete a job function. As such, HIPAA compliant tools must allow users to designate different levels of access to PHI through the use of unique login credentials.
- Track data use and disclosure. To ensure adherence to the “minimum necessary” standard and facilitate early detection of breaches, PHI access must be tracked for each user. HIPAA compliant tools for telemedicine allow users to keep audit logs that distinguish PHI access on a per user basis.
- Train staff. HIPAA compliance can only be as good as the staff trained to use your telehealth software. Make sure your staff is well trained before they begin using it.
The Pay-Off
Why go to all this trouble? Ultimately, it’s good for providers and patients.
“When virtual health works, provider organizations and their patients can make new strides toward that ‘triple aim’ of access, quality, and cost,” according to the consulting firm’s recent analysis on telehealth and security. “But virtual health won’t work that way until a critical mass of people is comfortable using it, and people won’t feel comfortable until they’re confident it’s secure.”
About Caregility’s HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform
Caregility offers a comprehensive, HIPAA-compliant virtual care platform that connects all patient and clinician environments. Attached to the platform are Caregility’s Access Point of Care Systems which are video-enabled and located wherever patients or clinicians are: in hospitals, post-acute facilities, outpatient clinics, and homes.
Whether used for continuous or intermittent patient observation, ad hoc patient check-ins, assessments, interventions, scheduled specialty consults, care team coordination and planning, or managing patients through transitions of care, the platform can enable any virtual care program.
Learn more about our virtual care platform.
Telehealth Trends: Looking back on 2021
2021 was another tough year for the world, but especially for the healthcare sector.
The emergence of the Delta variant exacerbated current shortages of healthcare workers who were already at their breaking point due to burnout. In fact, The Atlantic recently reported that about one in five healthcare workers has left their job since the pandemic started. With the arrival of Omicron, the healthcare sector is preparing for yet another shock, but much remains unknown.
As we look ahead to 2022, one thing is certain: the pandemic is not over yet.
If there is any silver lining at all, it’s that telehealth has been adopted widely and leaders continue to innovate to help the healthcare sector weather the storm—supporting staff to do more with less while continuously delivering the best outcomes for patients.
With this in mind, we wanted to look back and offer learnings from the past year by sharing our top performing content that engaged audiences like you. From webinars to whitepapers, we had fantastic discussions, explored new ideas and integrations, and embraced what’s possible today and beyond. See how:
Our Most-Watched Webinars
Innovation & Collaboration in Virtual Care
There’s never been a more important time for innovation and collaboration in the world of healthcare. In this webinar, Wendy Deibert and Scott Andrus of Caregility and Jonathan Witenko of Lee Health present examples and case studies of innovative telehealth solutions being deployed during the COVID-19 crisis.
Transform Clinical Surveillance with Integrated Virtual Care & Advanced Analytics
The patient surveillance landscape within healthcare is experiencing digital transformation like never before. The interoperability between virtual care environments and clinical decision support solutions presents endless opportunities to enhance patient care.
In this webinar, Scott Andrus of Caregility and Stuart Ramsey of PeraHealth will discuss the “art of the possible” as Caregility and PeraHealth venture to combine the power of virtual care and advanced patient analytics.
Our Most-Read Whitepapers
What Ease of Use Really Means in Telehealth
Everyone agrees that ease of use in a telehealth solution is critical, but it remains a vague criterion. What exactly can ease of use mean to patients, clinicians, and administrators? In this whitepaper, we explain how usability, functionality and user experience play out in practice, and provide examples of how each can help you meet real-world challenges.
How Augmented Video Analysis Is Improving Patient Care — and More
Just a short few years ago, virtual sitting was considered one of the most important technology implementations a hospital could make to reduce costs and improve patient safety. However, new advances in information technology move at lightning speed. Today, the traditional patient sitter model is now ready for an upgrade.
Enter “augmented intelligence” or AI — this tech is touted as the answer to solving many modern health care challenges. But what is it? How exactly does it work?
Our Most-Read Blog Posts
How Virtual Patient Sitters Are Protecting Patients While Keeping Costs Down
Learn how virtual observation has the capability to improve patient safety while enabling hospitals to more efficiently allocate resources —all without sacrificing the essential human-to-human element of patient care.
Improving Critical Care: Tele-ICU Safety, Savings, and Outcomes
The pandemic has exacerbated the challenges of overwhelmed, understaffed, and, often, undersupplied ICUs across the country. However, the pandemic has also sped up adoption of the tele-ICU, which is proving to be a critical tool in providing outstanding patient care and strong outcomes, while also preserving the safety of healthcare workers.
Telehealth News Roundup: What You Need to Know About the COVID Omicron Variant
The COVID-19 Omicron variant is spreading quickly — but fortunately, researchers are beginning to catch up and form a clearer picture of its potential impact.
Especially with the holiday season — and the inevitable uptick in travel — underway, healthcare providers and hospitals must be prepared for a potential increase in COVID-19 cases, as well as increased demand for testing and telehealth visits.Read on for our monthly news recap exploring the knowns and unknowns about Omicron, as well as how it is expected to impact the demand for telemedicine.
NBC
Virtual care companies are preparing for an increase in demand for telehealth visits as the Omicron variant continues to spread. During the Delta surge, healthcare providers in the Dallas, Texas area reported a 200-300% increase in telehealth visits — and now expect a similar rise in demand as Omicron spreads. Telehealth providers have the ability to guide patients through at-home COVID-19 testing, as well as potentially provide access to new anti-viral pills, if approved by the FDA.
American Medical Association
Much remains unknown about the transmissibility and severity of the new COVID-19 Omicron variant, including whether current vaccines protect against it. However, researchers and scientists do have answers to some common patient questions regarding why the variant is a concern, how contagious it is, the symptoms of the variant, and if there is an increased risk of reinfection following a positive test for COVID-19.
Becker’s Hospital Review
According to initial findings, the COVID-19 Omicron variant may spread twice as fast as Delta. This rapid spread may result from the variant’s contagiousness and its ability to evade the body’s immune defenses —including immunity gained from a prior infection. However, it is not yet clear if Omicron can evade vaccine protection.
Modern Healthcare
The COVID-19 Omicron variant first emerged in November in several southern African nations. Initial reports suggested that it could spread quickly and widely, prompting several countries to impose travel bans with the intent of containing the virus. However, while initial signs are worrisome, it’s still too early to determine if this variant is more or less dangerous than Delta.
Telehealth News Roundup: A Closer Look at the US Nursing Shortage
Delivering high quality patient care has become increasingly difficult for hospitals and health systems, which are experiencing an alarming exodus of nursing staff.
The American Nurses Association recently urged the Department of Health and Human Services to declare the country’s critical nursing shortage a national crisis. The ongoing shortage — a problem since 2012 — has only been exacerbated by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.
Hospitals and health systems are responding by enhancing their recruiting efforts, offering signing bonuses, and implementing an all-hands-on-deck approach to patient care. They’re also exploring innovative telehealth solutions to increase efficiencies and free up nurse time across healthcare facilities.
Read on for our monthly news roundup exploring the causes of the nursing shortage and how hospitals are responding.
Healthline
Though the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the nursing shortage, it didn’t actually cause it. America has been facing a critical nursing shortage since 2012 — and it’s expected to last until 2030. A combination of factors is driving the shortage, including a growing population of older adults, retirement, burnout, and an increased demand for healthcare due to more accessible health insurance.
Association of American Medical Colleges
To combat the nursing shortage, hospitals and health systems must innovate to maintain high quality patient care. For some hospitals, that means offering hefty signing bonuses to recruit new nurses and raising salaries to keep existing staff. For others, it means asking physicians and students to step in and perform duties typically performed by nurses, as well as tapping non-clinical staff to fill gaps such as delivering meals or transporting patients.
The New Republic
Given the overwhelming challenges of the last two years, it may seem like the COVID pandemic is to blame for the nursing shortage. While many nurses do cite recent burnout for leaving or changing jobs, there’s more to the story. Nurses say that hospital policies around staffing and productivity, as well as pay cuts all contribute to the decision to step away from healthcare jobs.
NPR
Hospitals across the country are desperate for nurses, with many offering signing bonuses or hiring students before they even graduate. However, the pipeline of new nurses is becoming narrower. The pandemic forced many schools to curtail training programs, making it harder for students to get the hands-on experience to graduate. A lack of instructors and students’ financial strain have also contributed to the problem.
Beyond EHRs: What is important in telehealth integrations?
One can take two approaches when innovating in the healthcare space. One method is highly technology-driven providing an end-to-end solution. The other is patient-centered with the focus being on the patient and clinician experience.
The latter method, Caregility’s method, is to be purpose-built. We meet our customers where they are at. Baked into our DNA, we strive to listen to our customers, their patients, and their clinicians and understand each clinical workflow, environment, or system. This guides our product development across the entire portfolio, both software and hardware. We evaluate every click a clinician must make, every voice that must be heard, and every situation that must be visually assessed. This relentless attention drives our designs, innovations, and interoperability with other solutions. Together, we are stronger.
Admittedly, I am biased as I have experienced both sides. There is a fair use case for following the first strategy. You may think of it as “soup to nuts.” Organizations that are at the absolute beginning of their journey, with minimal existing infrastructure or investment into other solutions, are often attracted to a telehealth platform that has already predefined all the workflows needed. And, that may be the right choice at the time.
But as these organizations gain momentum, they realize that their clinicians, facilities, and service lines all have their own specialty needs and unique workflows. They want customizations or solutions to meet each situation and yet they need a seamless user interface to support and maintain. The result is many solutions to manage versus one universal platform that meets all use cases escalating resource and financial consumption.
I’ve seen this scenario time and again. Either create point solutions for each individual scenario or orchestrate care leveraging all your resources seamlessly. I strongly believe in the second philosophy. Flexibility, adaptability, scalability, and interoperability should always be the governing principles in choosing any solution for delivering patient-centered care.
For telehealth, the right approach means integrating with other solutions, platforms, and technologies. But before we walk through all the ways a telehealth solution can do that, let’s take care of the obvious first integration: with your EHR.
The Devil in the EHR Integration Details
Your virtual care platform absolutely must integrate with your hospital’s EHR. But as hospital IT directors are aware, when it comes to EHR integration, the devil is in the details.
One EHR may accept a range of third-party integrations each with its own user experience, while another may require those integrations exist only within the umbrella of the EHR’s own user experience. Some publish APIs for certain workflows, but not others.
If your organization is in the process of selecting a virtual care platform, it’s important to understand these details. Ask whether the capabilities being requested by your clinical staff are limited by what the EHR allows, or what the platform provides.
But this isn’t just another EHR integration point. The EHR is undoubtedly one of, if not the biggest technology investments your organization makes. But don’t let the EHR integration question overshadow other important integrations.
There are several categories that are important to consider.
What types of integrations are important for virtual care?
As I said, part of our DNA is listening to our customers. We believe in giving them the biggest, broadest choices possible. Here are some examples where listening to our customers has driven the development of new integrations:
- Language interpretation services. Just as telehealth can be used to bring in various care specialists, sometimes specific language interpreters need to be brought in through remote video conferences as well. If these two services don’t integrate, you are faced with paying for two different systems, just to provide one consultation for a single patient. Ensuring that your language interpretation services can be integrated into existing systems avoids crowding in the patient room and duplicative investments.
- Clinical decision support. Clinical support applications are important tools for providing evidence-based, proactive care delivery for all types of patients. Having the ability to validate CDS data with real-time video analysis elevates any virtual nursing assessment. It perpetuates early intervention, improves outcomes, and provides the ability to scale resources across multiple facilities and healthcare settings.
- Remote patient monitoring & device integrations. There are several healthcare companies that specialize in remote patient monitoring to help health systems manage patients during recovery as well as long-term chronic care for patients outside the hospital. Usually, these solutions pair Internet-enabled medical devices with software applications that aggregate health information collected by the patient, analyze it, and transmit it to clinicians. Being able to integrate such a program into an enterprise-wide telehealth strategy will avoid duplication of services and help make the best use of the investment.
- Device integrations supported by Caregility: Eko
- Patient engagement platforms. Patient engagement platforms provide a range of services to patients during a hospital stay besides giving them entertainment, from showing the menu to order food, to displaying a calendar or giving information about their care team. Like many of the examples above, without proper integration the hospital will need to invest in duplicative hardware, crowding the room with additional screens and complicating the experience for patients and families.
Benefits of telehealth integration
Choosing a virtual care platform that integrates with innovative and legacy investments is a tall order.
With Caregility Cloud™️, you get an award-winning, enterprise-grade virtual care platform that offers a responsive, self-healing, purpose-built end-to-end telehealth for any use case – combined with the ability to integrate with multiple important systems.
Each offering is a story about a customer’s need satisfied, an investment maximized, a clinician’s job made easier, and a patient’s journey simplified.
This post was contributed by Jenna Walls, Vice President of Partnerships at Caregility
