Virtual conference offers an opportunity for health systems to prepare for next evolution of virtual care.
Long touted as an essential mechanism to transform healthcare delivery, yet underutilized due to regulatory and reimbursement barriers, telehealth has become an "overnight" sensation, and a silver lining in the coronavirus pandemic. Suddenly, it has become the go-to vehicle for providers to deliver care to patients, and innovative uses for virtual care are popping up in hospitals and healthcare systems across the nation. As the COVID-19 crisis abates, the healthcare industry is holding its collective breath, wondering what government waivers will be made permanent and whether telehealth will be allowed to thrive.
Against this backdrop, ATA—formerly the American Telemedicine Association—will hold its annual conference, ATA2020 Virtual Conference and Expo, from June 22‒26 as a virtual event. ATA CEO Ann Mond Johnson, MBA, MHA, says that "regulations finally caught up with what technology is able to do," accelerating a transformation that had been decades in the making. The promise of telemedicine, she says, is its potential "reimagine care, and that's exactly what's been happening."
As health systems determine what next steps to take with their virtual care programs, the conference will provide opportunities to learn about how organizations ramped up their telehealth initiatives for the pandemic and what they learned in the process, says Mond Johnson. One topic she expects to be of interest to hospital executives is how telehealth can be used to "start addressing the inequities in the healthcare system—the social determinants of health."
The event also will showcase technology that can further accelerate and propel telehealth initiatives. One area of growing interest is asynchronous communication, says Mond Johnson. Until recently, "When we talked about telehealth, we pretty much thought about synchronous video and audio communication," she says. "We're now seeing an incredible surge in async." Rather than a face-to-face encounter, this form of telehealth does not happen real time and uses technology to store and forward data. For example, a patient fills out a form through a secure text or app with current concerns about their health and recent history, and the physician later responds.
Joseph C. Kvedar, MD, president of ATA, vice president of Connected Health at Partners HealthCare, and professor of dermatology at Harvard Medical School, further explains the value of asynchronous communication. While telehealth provides a different channel to communicate with patients versus an in-person visit, he says, "It doesn't really increase our efficiency, and we need that desperately. In the same way that business people have learned that an email, for the most part, is more efficient than a phone call, the same applies in healthcare delivery." Front-end chatbots, remote monitoring, and asynchronous care, "are tools that we need to integrate into the care delivery process so that we can make sure our healthcare providers can take care of more patients per unit of time."
As patients begin returning to physician's offices for care, the ATA conference also will provide an opportunity for participants to exchange ideas about functioning in a hybrid environment that incorporates telehealth into daily workflow where physicians also provide in-person care," says Kvedar. "We have a whole new world to sort out—how we do these two things in tandem.
Now that telehealth is on the front burner, ATA is taking an active role to ensure that the barriers lifted that enabled access and reimbursement during the pandemic don't fall back in place once the crisis is over, says Mond Johnson While there have been promising signals from Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma, ATA is already engaged in an active campaign to address this issue, says Mond Johnson. Part of this effort includes scheduled testimony from Kvedar during a Senate hearing at 10:00 a.m. on June 17, Telehealth: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.
"As we work to make certain waivers permanent," says Mond Johnson, "we want to demonstrate that we've anticipated the concerns and questions that legislators and regulators might have." Data and research will support these efforts, she says. "At the same time, we want to lay the groundwork that shows that telehealth is good, and that we've won the hearts and minds of clinicians and consumers."
In recent years, "ATA has been working to support the vision of ensuring that people get care where and when they need it, and that when they do, they know it's safe, effective, and appropriate, while enabling clinicians to do more good for more people," says Mond Johnson. "What's changed in the last 10 weeks is … an incredible response on the part of our members. They have all stepped up … in record, time, in record numbers. That has been amazing. What we're doing is to really seize this very unique moment in history. It is incumbent on us as an industry to ensure that the gains that we've made associated with telehealth, and the utilization of it, remain permanent."
Mandy Roth is the innovations editor at HealthLeaders.
"continued" - Google News
June 16, 2020 at 08:12PM
https://ift.tt/37zJjUp
ATA Conference Sets Stage for Continued Telehealth Acceleration - HealthLeaders Media
"continued" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2WiTaZN
https://ift.tt/2YquBwx
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "ATA Conference Sets Stage for Continued Telehealth Acceleration - HealthLeaders Media"
Post a Comment