Telehealth Will Only Increase From Here
It’s clear to any healthcare provider at the moment that telehealth has seen a massive surge in use. Between patients who have the potential to infect those around them and social distancing guidelines in place, telehealth was a natural solution to avoid the spread of COVID while still providing needed treatment and care.
Researchers at Duke University recently examined how our current pandemic has affected telehealth, and what the future of it may be. Telehealth visits have skyrocketed during the pandemic, but these visits aren’t exclusive to patients inquiring about the coronavirus. While those types of visits accounted for a lot of the initial increase, telehealth visits are increasingly made up of people who have routine follow-ups or other, less urgent issues like managing a chronic condition.
To be most effective, healthcare institutions and their telehealth solutions need to be tightly integrated with other technologies like EMRs. This is particularly true in the case of patients calling in where a provider needs to see a complete picture of the patient’s medical history to give proper care. Health systems are also finding new uses for their telecommunications equipment, allowing for virtual visits not just with doctors, but with patients as well. Since visitors aren’t able to come to the hospital, they can now see loved ones virtually, using the same equipment that would be used for a telehealth visit.
While certain payment hurdles have been overcome with emergency orders, it’s likely that telehealth will see more concrete rules put in place given that it isn’t going away any time soon. It will certainly be a crucial part of any future infectious disease response, but in the near term, there are a glut of telehealth appointments still waiting to happen.
The pandemic has caused financial chaos for healthcare institutions due to the large-scale delay of elective health care procedures. Most of these procedures are things that can be delayed, but not indefinitely like trivial cosmetic work. Hospitals are going to need to get back to these surgeries like hip replacements or cataract surgery to regain their financial footing. Telehealth will be the key to getting patients both pre- and post-operative information and care as limitations to hospital capacity and social distancing guidelines continue.
As important as an increase in telehealth usage has been and will continue to be, it’s a lever that can be used to ease the current burdens rather than a panacea. Proper access to technology can be a burden for many patients and even health systems. Just this month, the Department of Health and Human Services awarded
funds to create more telehealth adoption, so it may be some time before the technology is ubiquitous.
At Extract, we know that the middle of a telehealth visit is the last time your physicians want to be searching through unfamiliar image files in the EMR to find relative patient information. That’s why we offer a solution that takes the important data from your incoming unstructured documents and sends it directly to a patient’s medical record or other downstream system.
Our goal is to empower your staff to work on the highest value projects they can. That means clinicians focusing on patient care, HIM staff avoiding manual data entry, and researchers with historical data at their fingertips.
If you’d like to learn more about how our HealthyData platform can automatically turn your documents into actionable data, please reach out today.
