"The first hurdle is knowledge-based: knowing a patient experienced a recent sepsis diagnosis and sepsis hospitalization," says Benjamin A. Zaniello, MD, MPH.

This article was originally published August 26, 2020 on PSQH by John Palmer

Editor’s note: The following Q&A resulted from a conversation with Benjamin A. Zaniello, MD, MPH, chief medical officer at Salt Lake City–based Collective Medical. The company recently rolled out an event notification and care collaboration platform that identifies patients with a history of sepsis so that care teams may more quickly intervene to address these patients’ unique needs.

Sepsis is the number one driver of hospital costs in the United States and—according to the CDC—accounts for more than one-third of hospital deaths and more than $24 billion in hospital expenses. Sepsis is the most expensive all-payer condition in the United States.

PSQH: Why is sepsis such a prevalent problem in U.S. hospitals? Why are survivors rehospitalized so often? What are the factors that put them at such high risk?

Benjamin Zaniello: Sepsis is prevalent in U.S. hospitals for a variety of reasons—from the fact that it’s not always easy to identify sepsis before it becomes life-threatening to the high number of seniors living in the U.S. with multiple comorbidities such as heart disease and kidney failure. One recent study indicated that sepsis is associated with one in five deaths globally, twice the amount that some previous estimates indicated. That’s not surprising, considering how insidious it is.

The main problem is that sepsis is hard to identify because it has multiple signs. In an elderly patient, sepsis could originate from an untreated or undertreated UTI. In a pregnant woman, it could manifest from the flu. In a child, it could escalate from a skin infection.

It is a problem of sensitivity versus specificity. It’s very easy to be specific—to know a patient has sepsis when it’s too late. It’s hard to be sensitive in sepsis identification when the potential at-risk population is so large.

PSQH: What do you think is the biggest hurdle to overcome when it comes to preventing the rehospitalization of a sepsis patient?

Zaniello: The first hurdle is knowledge-based: knowing a patient experienced a recent sepsis diagnosis and sepsis hospitalization. Often physicians have no idea that someone who arrives in their ED or clinic had a recent history of sepsis. We know from the statistics that only half of all patients fully recover post-sepsis and the other half needs very, very close follow-up—but they aren’t usually getting the level of close follow-up care that they need.

With sepsis you often see comorbidities like congestive heart failure, which requires close follow-up to monitor weight and manage edema and medication. Another common side effect of sepsis is acute renal failure, which, if not addressed by a specialist post-discharge, can turn into chronic renal failure (and a higher risk of rehospitalization).

The second biggest hurdle is the fragmentation of our healthcare system. Sepsis patients are often managed in one hospital, but their follow-up is in another—we frequently see the patient transferred from their community hospital to a Level I trauma center or an academic hospital, but when they’re transferred back to their community hospital, information isn’t shared between facilities and providers.

Until recently, sharing that kind of information across a network—between disparate health systems, even in the same state—was next to impossible.

PSQH: What is the intent of rolling out the sepsis history alerting functionality on the Collective platform, and how does it work?

Zaniello: A study published by JAMA found 42.6% of severe sepsis survivors were rehospitalized within 90 days—so it’s absolutely essential for care teams to know these patients are at high risk. To do this, hospitals and healthcare systems need to be able to address the gaps in care coordination that affect the outcomes of their patients. Sepsis patients or those with history of sepsis are high-risk and high-needs patients that benefit from careful, close collaboration post-discharge.

The highest-risk patients are geriatric patients, discharged from postacute facilities, who require more intensive care collaboration and monitoring. By flagging patients with history of sepsis in our system, care providers on the Collective Medical network can intervene much more quickly. Health plans, ACOs, and relevant healthcare providers are notified as soon as their patients are discharged with a recent history of sepsis, allowing them to collaborate with critical providers notified at point of care. Likewise, when a sepsis survivor presents at an ED, physicians and nurses are notified in real time of the patient’s history with sepsis, allowing them to act more quickly and with better context.

PSQH: Is there an area of the country where sepsis rehospitalization seems to be a bigger problem than others? Why?

Zaniello: From what I’ve seen, states that have a stronger managed care network tend to have a slightly lower risk of sepsis, while more urban areas with higher concentrations of patients will have a higher rate of sepsis per capita. The states with an older population like Florida are going to have a higher rate because they have a larger geriatric population.

But it is a risk everywhere—even in the most highly-rated hospitals staffed with the best care providers in the world. The best way to effectively lower our risk of rehospitalization is to address sepsis before it exacerbates by identifying risk factors early, intervening on a timely basis, and using the technology and resources at our disposal to coordinate care.

PSQH: What results have you seen in the short time the alert system has been rolled out?

Zaniello: Prior to the national rollout, the states that used the Collective Medical platform saw significant reduction in various outcomes, including avoidable ED visits. In Oregon, for example, use of the Collective platform contributed to a statewide reduction in potentially avoidable ED visits from patients with patterns of high utilization by 11.2% across 2018. As an example of another outcome supported by our platform, during that same time period, comorbid substance use disorder–related visits fell by 4%, while visits within 90 days following development of an initial care guideline fell 31%.

We’re really encouraged by these figures. With sepsis, ultimately, you’re dealing with something that is hard to identify [until] it arrives and presents an emergency that is frequently fatal.

By improving our identification of patients with high risk factors (e.g., those with previous incidents of sepsis) and notification process, it’s possible to change the scope of care and potential outcomes for those patients.

John Palmer is a freelance writer who has covered healthcare safety for numerous publications. Palmer can be reached at johnpalmer@palmereditorial.com.

Patient deterioration, which refers to the worsening of a patient’s condition during a hospital stay, has become a growing concern and affects as many as one in six inpatient admissions.

This article was originally published August 5, 2020 on PSQH by John Palmer

Editor’s note: The following Q&A resulted from a conversation PSQH had with Nancy Riffel, MSA, BSN, RN, the patient services manager for Covenant HealthCare, a 643-bed hospital in Saginaw, Michigan, that is the largest healthcare provider in the Great Lakes Bay Region. Riffel has been a nurse for more than 40 years.

The hospital recently installed Centrella® smart beds from Chicago-based Hill-Rom with contact-free, continuous monitoring powered by EarlySense in its 24-bed medical pulmonary unit to continuously monitor patients’ respiratory and heart rates, the most common and problematic signs of patient deterioration.

Patient deterioration, which refers to the worsening of a patient’s condition during a hospital stay, has become a growing concern and affects as many as one in six inpatient admissions.

PSQH: Why is it important to identify if a patient is deteriorating, and how can a smart bed help those with COVID-19?

Nancy Riffel: One of the best ways to protect patients from this problem is to recognize changes in their vital signs, which can accurately predict clinical deterioration. One study found that 60% of patients had a documented physiological indication before a cardiac arrest, unplanned ICU admission, and/or death.

Though much about COVID-19 remains a mystery, one thing is certain: It can turn deadly in a heartbeat, and the smart beds turned out to be a lifesaver in many cases where the hospital was able to identify deteriorating cases faster using the beds.

A Reuters story I read reports that “the speed with which patients are declining and dying from the novel coronavirus is shocking even to veteran doctors and nurses.” A recent study shows that early identification systems for COVID patients using triggers based on vital signs to escalate care have resulted in lower mortality rates.

PSQH: What are some of the biggest challenges facing nurses (besides their usual daily duties) when it comes to monitoring the conditions of COVID-19 patients? How can smart beds help them do their jobs more efficiently?

Riffel: One of the biggest challenges for our nurses is identifying the first signs of deterioration, since the virus can overwhelm patients in a matter of minutes. When this was a pulmonary unit, nurses would do hourly rounds. But to protect nurses from infection and preserve our PPE supplies, they now go into COVID patients’ rooms only every four hours or when necessary.

The smart beds with continuous monitoring have become an essential tool in our toolbox. When a patient’s heart or respiratory rate moves higher or lower than preset parameters, the beds alert the nursing staff using nurse call as well as visual and audible alarms outside the room. A nurse who enters the room can glance at the bed monitor to immediately see the abnormal rate. Nurses also can access trending data to guide decisions about initiating a call to action to response teams, which can decide if the patient needs to be transferred to a higher level of care such as the ICU.

This monitoring method gives our staff the reassurance of knowing they can track a patient’s condition without having to put on PPE and step into the room. Also, high respiratory rates are the No. 1 concern for COVID patients, and it’s impossible for nurses to “eyeball” shallow but rapid rate changes as well as the monitors.

We have had about 120 patients on the COVID unit, and five of them were intubated within an hour after their bed alarms went off. Since installing the monitoring system, the unit has not had any code blue alarms, and not one patient has had a cardiac arrest.

PSQH: Are smart beds connected to the internet or other networks that could be susceptible to hackers? Is there a concern that sensitive patient information could be compromised, and how is that mitigated?

Riffel: The smart beds are not connected to the internet or any networks and monitor only respiratory and heart rates, so there is no risk that sensitive patient information could be compromised.

PSQH: While alarms on a bed are important to make sure that nurses are alerted when a patient needs help, a recent trend in healthcare is to reduce the number of alarms in patient care units. How will the smart beds help continue this trend, while improving the outcome of patients with COVID-19?

Riffel: Alarms are absolutely essential, but the problem with them is that too many are false or non-actionable. In fact, The Joint Commission estimates that 85% to 99% of alarm signals do not require clinical intervention.

That’s not the case with our contact-free, continuous monitoring alerts. First of all, we are not concerned with their accuracy because we have not had any false alarms. When the alarms go off, all our nurses know they need to check the patient for signs of distress.

Unlike telemetry device alarms, which can be triggered when the monitoring leads become detached from the patient, the smart bed sensors under the mattress do not touch the patient. When patients lie down, these sensors continuously record their respiratory and heart rates and send alarms only when these rates are outside preset measures. Nurses also can easily change the alarm parameters as needed to make them appropriate for each patient.

The smart beds are a wonderful complement to the telemetry equipment we use for some of our unit’s COVID patients. Being able to continuously monitor patients without attaching anything to them not only eases our staff’s workload, but also improves patient experiences.

PSQH: What kinds of technology do smart beds use to monitor patients? AI and machine learning are both new technologies that are making their way into healthcare. How will these technologies replace the healthcare worker—and in what ways shouldn’t they?

Riffel: The monitoring system uses patented sensing and signal processing technology sensitive enough to detect subtle vibration and motion signals in the chest, hands, legs, or torso as often as twice a second. Based on this information, proprietary analytic software can determine heart pulse and respiratory rate patterns and alert nurses when significant changes occur.

This technology will never replace healthcare workers—it just lets them know that a patient urgently needs their attention. Our nurses have so much to do when caring for COVID patients and have enthusiastically welcomed the smart bed monitoring solutions as a complement to their responsibilities.

PSQH: Are there any dangers to relying on the technology of smart beds too much? While certainly lifesaving and a breakthrough, how can healthcare workers ensure that the information they are getting is accurate? What mitigation factors (such as human monitoring) need to be in place as a safeguard? Is that even possible on a busy COVID-19 unit with so many other things going on?

Riffel: As I have mentioned, we trust the accuracy of this technology in the same way we trust a thermometer to give us a patient’s accurate temperature. But, again, smart beds are only tools. Nurses and managers still need to regularly listen to COVID patients’ lungs, assess their overall health, and provide support that can come only from human contact. We must always remember: COVID patients can deteriorate very quickly, so we can never let our guard down.

For Covenant HealthCare to fulfill our mission of providing extraordinary care for every generation, we need to continue investing in state-of-the-art equipment. I have been a nurse for more than 40 years, and I believe these smart beds are amazing and will save lives. I often tell my staff, “You don’t know how lucky you are to have them.”

The pandemic also highlighted how technology and communication gaps can jeopardize patient care and staff safety. 

This article was originally published July 20, 2020 on PSQH by John Palmer

Editor’s note: The following Q&A resulted from a conversation PSQH had with Stacy Pur, vice president of product development at Minneapolis-based VigiLanz, a company that provides real-time clinical surveillance systems for hospitals.

With a potential second wave of COVID-19 on the horizon for the fall, combined with the regular flu season, real-time surveillance alerts may be the key to infection prevention as well as mitigating and controlling future on-premises infections.

PSQH: If clinical surveillance is so important, why do only 29% of surveyed hospitals use it? What would improve the rate of surveillance usage?

Stacy Pur: Clinical surveillance is a fairly new technology, developed about 10 years after EHRs [electronic health records]. Unfortunately, some of the early clinical surveillance solutions were fraught with issues, such as issuing alerts that weren’t relevant, meaningful, or appropriate, as well as tedious, inefficient workflows. These factors contributed to a slow initial adoption rate.

Over the past few years, clinical surveillance has significantly improved, and hospitals are taking notice. While the survey found that currently only one-third of hospitals are using clinical surveillance, about half of those who aren’t using it yet plan to do so by 2022. Hospitals are increasingly recognizing its value, particularly as the technology continues to grow in sophistication and efficiency.

PSQH: What will COVID-19 tell us about the status of patient safety in healthcare facilities? Will it improve some things? Make some things worse?

Pur: While hospitals have made significant patient safety gains over the past few years, and while they have responded to the pandemic with heroic efforts, COVID has exposed some critical patient safety challenges at hospitals across the country. For example, many hospitals struggled with delayed COVID-positive patient identification, PPE shortages, ventilator shortages, and lack of adequate capacity during the first surge of COVID patients.

The pandemic also highlighted how technology and communication gaps can jeopardize patient care and staff safety. For example, from an infection prevention standpoint, the faster that healthcare providers have information about a patient’s risk of currently being infected with a contagious illness like COVID, the sooner they can isolate that patient and contain the spread, initiate contact tracing, equip staff with PPE, and begin treating the patient appropriately.

In the early stages of the pandemic, positive test results took days to come back. Hospitals needed technology that looked beyond test results to identify probable infectious patients who not only needed to be isolated, but also needed to have their contacts assessed. Many hospitals were able to do this, as well as respond more proactively to the threat of drug shortages, by deploying clinical surveillance. For example, Sharp HealthCare in San Diego set up rules in its clinical surveillance platform to alert relevant providers in real time when patients have symptoms consistent with COVID, when COVID test results are ordered, what the results are, and when select medications are ordered inappropriately.

COVID has taught us that when healthcare systems are stressed, patient safety is vulnerable. It has also shown that tools that improve efficiency for healthcare workers and that improve the quality and timeliness of information provided to healthcare workers have immediate positive impacts to the safety of all concerned.

PSQH: COVID-19 has made it so only about 40% feel comfortable going to a hospital, the place everybody should feel comfortable about going to for help. Why is this, and what are some of the things that need to be done to improve customer confidence?

Pur: At the height of the first wave, many hospitals faced unprecedented patient demand that strained EDs and ICUs, and created critical supply shortages. Customers felt unsafe because many hospitals were not safe. Crowded EDs filled with infectious patients, and hospitals lacked basic protective measures, such as PPE. This was a recipe for disaster and resulted in the deaths of several healthcare workers.

Hospitals learned a lot from the first wave. They are acquiring additional PPE, increasing training on infection prevention protocols and procedures, implementing new technology such as clinical surveillance that can help them more rapidly identify and isolate COVID patients, and modifying their contingency plans to include overflow areas when cases increase.

The key for hospitals moving forward is effective communication with customers regarding how they will keep them safe. Then, hospitals must actively model the steps they are communicating. A sign in the ED that says everyone must wear a mask is meaningless unless healthcare workers wear masks at all times. If patients are still waiting in communal areas, hospitals should consider having them wait in their cars.

Hospitals are taking extraordinary measures to improve safety and have learned some valuable lessons. They should continue to apply these lessons even after the pandemic begins to wane.

PSQH: What types of clinical surveillance tools would work best for most hospitals looking to improve patient safety in general? With less than 40% using technology to detect problems such as opioid problems and viral outbreaks, it seems there is a lot of work to do.

Pur: When hospitals first began implementing EHRs, many healthcare workers hoped the technology would make providing patient care much easier. Instead, in many cases, they are tied to screens responding to large numbers of alerts that are little more than white noise, performing redundant documentation, and struggling to find answers to the most basic questions. For new technologies to be successfully adopted and implemented, they must introduce meaningful efficiencies and naturally fit into providers’ everyday workflows. If it’s not easy for healthcare providers to use, and if it doesn’t communicate with established tools such as EHRs, meaningful data won’t be extracted, and providers won’t have the time to use it. Hospitals looking to implement clinical surveillance must prioritize solutions that have the sophistication to provide highly targeted alerts and offer seamless integration and easy implementation.

In addition, as we have seen with recent events, healthcare needs can change on a dime. Clinical surveillance technology needs to be nimble and responsive; able to adapt to the new needs of practitioners within hours, not weeks. For example, if a hospital’s top priority is reducing acute kidney injury, the clinical surveillance provider should be able to provide support that aligns with current industry gold standards, but that also can address the unique challenges specific to that institution’s patient population.

Key clinical surveillance attributes that hospitals should look for in a solution platform include the ability to do the following:

• Provide targeted real-time identification of patients requiring active interventions
• Identify and manage safety events in patients, employees, and visitors
• Provide ongoing, behind-the-scenes analytics detecting disease clustering, medication usage patterns, outbreaks, and other unusual trends of value to safety-driven cultures
• Identify complex medication errors or adverse events
• Identify opportunities to optimize care
• Identify opportunities to mitigate risk, such as opioid use

PSQH: With a possible second wave of COVID on the horizon, what are some of the biggest things that hospitals and healthcare workers need to be vigilant about? How will we know if a second wave is here?

Pur: The “second wave” is irrelevant, in my opinion. The reality is that COVID is here. Cases will wax and wane until an effective vaccine is developed and a large percent of the world population has been immunized or developed immunity. This will likely take years. Healthcare organizations must implement new strategies to rapidly recognize infectious individuals, screen employees, communicate shortages, assist stressed and/or infected healthcare workers, adapt to disease surges, implement telemedicine more broadly, and assure active and effective employee and public communication. These strategies should also remain in place permanently.

Most importantly, the science must continue to be actively monitored. Just recently, a new strain of influenza was detected, the G4 EA H1N1 influenza virus, which has acquired increased human infectivity. This is certainly not an immediate concern. However, COVID was “not an immediate concern” for months—until it was.

As healthcare organizations monitor the scientific findings that are helping improve COVID outcomes, vigilance around the next new concerns—whether they be infectious, economic, supply chain, environmental, or worker related—must be ongoing. Clinical surveillance tools that quietly monitor while supporting the science, and that alert healthcare providers when action is indicated, will be invaluable as we move into the new norms around the pandemic and challenges to healthcare in general.

PSQH: What should hospitals be doing right now to be ready for a second wave?

Pur: They should debrief on what has gone well and what hasn’t. They should consider not only implementing their best ideas permanently, but also sharing them more broadly with their peers. For areas where they were challenged, they should analyze and, if possible, test and implement new approaches.

If not yet in place, they should explore new technologies and solutions, such as clinical surveillance, cleaning solutions, and telehealth.

They should also assess their surge plans to ensure they have adequate PPE and other supplies and evaluate their overflow plans.

John Palmer is a freelance writer who has covered healthcare safety for numerous publications. Palmer can be reached at johnpalmer@palmereditorial.com.

During the pandemic, the spotlight has turned to telehealth and its power to deliver healthcare while maintaining social distancing.

This article was originally published July 15, 2020 on PSQH by Peter Antall, MD

“We have the technology.” It’s a catchphrase from “The Six Million Dollar Man,” a TV show that filled children of the 1970s with the hope that they would one day live in a world where bionic humans weren’t just the stuff of science fiction. And while bionic implants are still an emerging but competitive market, we’re entering a time when the digital health advancements many of us once dreamed of, like virtual care, are transforming healthcare as we know it.

Now, those advancements are not only critical to our country’s defense against the coronavirus pandemic—both the current wave and the subsequent waves—but they’re also allowing us to reimagine how all healthcare is delivered.

During the pandemic, the spotlight has turned to telehealth and its power to deliver healthcare while maintaining social distancing. But as the World Health Organization warns of a second peak of coronavirus cases in the United States and a second wave of COVID-19 later this year, healthcare leaders must consider: How do we apply the rear-view mirror lessons from the first wave of the pandemic to our virtual response to consumers’ healthcare needs during the second wave? 

Further, as many providers adopted telehealth for the first time during the COVID-19 outbreak, they experienced how telehealth could benefit their practice even outside of a pandemic.

Here are three key insights gained during the initial trajectory of COVID-19 around incorporating telehealth as a first response.

1. Strengthen the infrastructure for telehealth. 

As we saw during the first wave of the coronavirus, even health systems that had invested in telehealth found they needed to dramatically ramp up their capabilities to meet swelling demand.

Forrester Research projects that virtual visits will reach 1 billion in the United States this year, with 900 million resulting from COVID-19 alone. “This is going to become medicine, moving forward,” one health system leader shared with me recently. “The pandemic has pushed virtual care ahead 10 years.”

For example, at Augusta University (AU) Health System in Georgia, the organization had a relatively new home-based telehealth program when COVID-19 hit. Health system leaders quickly realized that this program would play a big role in their response to the pandemic; however, the ability to rapidly scale would be a challenge. They also found, like many other organizations, that the process of shifting most of their ambulatory care visits to an all-digital format was challenging.

Once the coronavirus began to spread, AU Health quickly bolstered its telehealth capabilities, training 400 providers on virtual COVID-19 screenings and collaborating with the Georgia Department of Health and the Georgia National Guard to open testing sites.

From March 10–20, AU Health performed 1,500 virtual COVID-19 screenings; by April 20, it had conducted 3,500 virtual screenings. Those who qualified for testing based on a virtual screening were directed to an emergency department (ED) testing center established by AU Health.

Today, AU Health is expanding its telehealth footprint and creating virtual services in the ambulatory space, such as postoperative visits and geriatric care. So far, 22% of ambulatory visits have been converted to telehealth, primarily in areas such as behavioral health, neurology, family medicine, and pediatrics. The system’s goal is to convert 50% of ambulatory visits to telehealth.

The onus isn’t just on providers to support a more robust telehealth response. For the U.S. healthcare system to fully leverage telehealth throughout the coronavirus pandemic, stakeholders such as government, health plans, and health systems must partner to:

• Ensure equitable access to broadband technologies for patients
• Limit regulatory barriers to telehealth adoption, such as licensure portability and reimbursement reform
• Incentivize programs that encourage innovation, particularly for vulnerable populations in skilled nursing and long-term care facilities​​​​​

2. Position telehealth as the “great load balancer” in healthcare. 

Using telehealth to leverage clinicians from areas that are less affected by the coronavirus can replenish vital healthcare services in areas that are overwhelmed. This puts trained resources where they are most needed, saving lives while shielding those who have not been infected. It’s an approach that also helps to prevent harm, such as when local workers become overtaxed in keeping up with demands for care.

Our own Amwell Medical group ensures we can provide this assistance by obtaining multiple state licenses for our providers. This notion was also extremely helpful during the initial COVID-19 wave. For instance, the New York medical license reciprocity allowed us to project our entire national network of providers to help the New York City outbreak.

Another example is Ochsner Health in Louisiana, which enables providers from outside their system to “Uber into the telehealth app.” More than 2,400 providers—both within and outside the health system—are trained to deliver virtual care through Ochsner Health’s telehealth platform. Currently, about 230 on-demand urgent care visits take place each day, with an average wait time of just eight minutes. The organization far surpassed its goal of 6,000 telehealth visits in 2020, with more than 80,000 virtual visits conducted since March alone.

Even within a state, any provider who is duly licensed can provide telehealth services throughout that state. This is useful for specialty consults, on-call coverage, and projecting care to rural regions. But, as mentioned above, national licensure or a national compact allows for much greater load-balancing potential.

The Federation of State Medical Boards’ Interstate Medical Licensure Compact has helped some, but it is fraught with challenges and only available in some states. The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated what can be achieved when state licensure barriers are removed; hopefully the future will involve more licensure portability.

3. Establish the right incentives for virtual care. 

The use of telehealth to replace in-person, routine care ensures continuity in care without exposing individuals to other illnesses—including the coronavirus—in the waiting areas of physician practices or EDs. Leading health plans are already offering telehealth to their members, but with caveats, and the offerings are disproportionately in states with reimbursement mandates.

In the federal space, reimbursement for telehealth is still spotty—permissible in Medicare Advantage (MA) but hamstrung in fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare by the site restriction. Medicaid coverage for telehealth exists, though it varies dramatically by state.

But expanding access to telehealth will require commercial payers and the federal government to incentivize providers and patients to use virtual care, and to offer payment parity for in-person and virtual services. It also necessitates regulatory flexibility, including greater flexibility around modality and model.

Prior to COVID-19, CMS took steps to increase access to telehealth for seniors by allowing MA plans to make telehealth a core benefit. After the arrival of the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services also took steps that resulted in a waiving of the Medicare site restriction for FFS Medicare. This has increased utilization and, importantly, encouraged providers to adopt telehealth for their entire patient panels.

The technology to combat the pandemic is here

The use of telehealth to transform our response to the coronavirus pandemic isn’t some futuristic idea. Telehealth was already establishing itself as a standard point of care prior to COVID-19. But during the pandemic, telehealth has become a necessity—and a vital part of most systems’ strategies.

Telehealth has played a key role in triage and gatekeeping overloaded EDs. It’s allowed providers to care for their patients while their offices are closed or restricted, and it has given patients much-needed access to care. In short, telehealth has saved lives and helped keep our healthcare system going. As we move forward, telehealth will simply be a part of how routine healthcare is delivered.

Peter Antall, MD, is chief medical officer for Amwell, a telemedicine provider.