It’s fair to say that the pandemic has gone on longer than most people initially suspected. While plenty of challenges still wait ahead of us, it seems that with vaccine procurement and rollout accelerating, there’s at least a light at the end of the tunnel.
There are plenty of lessons that can, and should, be learned from how the pandemic was handled. This ranges from appropriate government messaging and guidelines to proper PPE readiness and safe working guidelines. These lessons can serve us well when the next pandemic inevitably arises, but in the meantime, there are improvements and changes we can make within healthcare to be more effective than just returning to how things used to be.
HealthcareITNews recently interviewed healthcare technology executives to pin down what some of these lessons learned are, and what they mean for a new standard way of doing business.
Telehealth
We said back in May that telehealth was only going to increase in prevalence. Virtual access to clinicians was almost a luxury before the pandemic, but quickly became a necessity during it. What’s come out of the pandemic is that there are real benefits and expectations around virtual care now. ChristianaCare, for example, has decided that, “all care that can be digital will be digital.”
Organizations like M Health Fairview saw the monthly number of telehealth visits balloon from 3,500 in a month in January, 2020 to 120,000 by April. The majority of their patients say that they’re likely to use phone calls and video visits going forward as well.
While the wave of telehealth visits may not seem to be a huge deal if you live close to your provider, it’s making a big difference in underserved groups and forcing conversations of access as well. Virtual care expands the reach of healthcare organizations, but it also got them thinking about who has the ability to actually participate in virtual care from home. At ChristianaCare, this led to a grant from the Federal Communications Commission to bring devices to patients for health monitoring and video visits.
Agility
One thread that was common throughout all of the comments was the importance of being nimble. Many organizations had to deploy solutions that they’d have like to spend years on in weeks. A lot of people in healthcare were forced to adapt quickly, whether they had the capability to or not, which led some to think about how their organizational processes and workflows were structured.
At Blessing Health System, customization, which was once viewed as a benefit, became a liability. They found that while it was nice to indulge different parts of the organization with custom workflows, it was difficult to make large scale changes in a time of crisis because of the amount of nonstandard appointment types, varying human resources policies, and even redundant customizations.
Blessing Health also re-evaluated their decision-making processes. While they had been previously pleased with their outcomes, a process that included too many stakeholders took too much time during the pandemic. Now, and in the future, Blessing has focused the avenues for taking on new projects, added classifications to drive urgency, and used a ‘participatory hierarchy’ to shorten approval paths.
Staff
Perhaps underrepresented in the interviews, but a very important point is the need for support staff to be taken care of. The pandemic responses that healthcare organizations adopted took a massive toll on clinicians and on the support staff needed to get things up and running. It’s becoming increasingly important to recognize burnout and encourage time off and it can be difficult to do so when many workers are remote. Some organizations also offered time for employees to have casual video chats with co-workers to ease the distance between them.
What’s important from all of this is not just that healthcare organizations were able to adapt to quickly changing conditions during the pandemic, but that they’ll be able to streamline processes for the foreseeable future, and that they’ll be better prepared for the next health crisis.
At Extract, we do our part by simplifying the data entry process. Whether you’re receiving COVID results, outside labs, or any other document that’s not directly interfaced with your systems, our software reads the document like a person would, delivering any discrete data from it to your EMR or DMS. That way, your clinicians can look directly at results, rather than search through scans for the information they need. If you’d like to learn more about our software, please reach out.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.