How One System Transformed Care Delivery During the Crush of COVID

Rachel Donovan, managing director of enterprise marketing strategy, Nemours Children’s Health

It wasn’t just any Friday the 13th. It was March 13, 2020 — the day the federal government declared a national emergency due to the ongoing outbreak of COVID-19.

Across the country, businesses started to shut down; people started working remotely, and hospitals, including Nemours Children’s Health, had to figure out how to quickly optimize their teams to safely meet the needs of patients and providers.

“I’ll never forget that day. My team was told to bring their laptops home, we trained operational support teams, ordered massive amounts of webcams, we had iPads and we were just deploying equipment everywhere. There was no formal process; it was just moving very fast,” says Rachel Donovan, managing director of enterprise marketing strategy at Nemours Children’s.

A team from Nemours Children’s recently shared the system’s journey and how it aligned marketing, clinical operations, and telehealth program administration to develop a cross-functional approach to transformation that met the needs of families during this critical time.

The challenge for Nemours Children’s, the largest multi-state children’s health system in the country, was unique. The system provides pediatric primary, urgent, specialty, and hospital care at two freestanding children’s hospitals and outpatient locations in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida. With 24 hospital collaborations and 34 states leveraging Nemours Children’s evidence-based population health strategies, this wasn’t scaling an operation; it was creating a system to serve the entire enterprise.

As clinics shut down, patients, many of whom had no experience with telemedicine, needed to prepare for a new way of accessing medical visits and consultations. In one day, telemedicine went from being a small part of the larger system of care delivery to an enterprise-wide necessity to ensure patient safety.

Read the full story now and learn more:

COVID Accelerates Enterprise Telehealth Adoption at Nemours Children’s Health

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