This Is Telehealth’s Moment: Is Your Organization Prepared?

Jeff Sargent, director of virtual health, Connecticut Children’s

As healthcare consumers nationwide are still being urged to stay home when possible, the surge in demand for virtual visits has provider organizations nationwide scrambling to scale up telehealth capabilities if they have them — or stand them up if not.

What does it take to completely change the way you deliver care, practically overnight?

Organizations that already had telehealth up and running have a distinct advantage, but even they face the operational challenges of quickly onboarding physicians.

Connecticut Children’s in Hartford is working with Duet Health on an enterprise app that seamlessly integrates a range of functions, including Epic MyChart, wayfinding, and others. Video visits were one of the features within MyChart that the children’s hospital activated prior to the pandemic.

“We began with video visits for postoperative follow-up visits, as these are typically short visits and many times primarily conversational,” says Jeff Sargent, director of virtual health at Connecticut Children’s. “Allowing families to have the convenience of checking in virtually saves the family time off from work, travel, parking, etc. for a short conversation.”

When it became clear that Connecticut was going to be part of the coronavirus epicenter in the Northeast, Connecticut Children’s saw the necessity of significantly scaling up virtual visits. “We brought 24 specialties online with video visits in two weeks,” Sargent says. “Enabling remote care was the right thing to do in order to keep our immune-compromised kids safe and our at-risk providers safe as well.”

Read the full story now: Demand for Virtual Visits Skyrockets During Pandemic: How to Get Your Organization Up to Speed

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