Providers planning for permanent deployment of telemedicine

PARCA eNews – Sept. 2, 2021 – As the pandemic grinds on the use of telemedicine is emerging as a mainstay for healthcare delivery among many providers and patients. Health systems are beginning to incorporate it into planning beyond the emergency implementations spurred by the pandemic.

A group of Stanford Department of Medicine researchers looked into their own institution’s implementation of telemedicine and published their findings in the Aug. 30, 2021 Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.
The researchers outlined its limitations and weaknesses and made nearly a dozen recommendations for extending telemedicine into the health delivery system to address more complex healthcare issues and to ultimately improve care delivery.

"To optimize patient and provider experience through telemedicine, stakeholders need to focus on enhancing technology interoperability and usability and providing sufficient training for efficient telemedicine use," they wrote. "While in-person visits are essential in many conditions, telemedicine may be a viable alternative for certain patient populations and care needs; understanding and prioritizing patients who are most appropriate for telemedicine and in which clinical situations are important future steps."

Among the recommendations for making telemedicine a sustainable part of healthcare were:

• Support team science and exchange of patient information across care teams and settings
• Enhance disease management with remote monitoring technologies and AI algorithms to alert escalated care needs
• Improve telemedicine usability to accommodate diverse workflows and provide positive care experience for patients and providers
• Implement telemedicine training in medical health informatics education programs
• Apply a systematic approach for telemedicine implementation and evaluation involving multiple stakeholders
• Deploy telemedicine kiosks at community centers or retail pharmacies to ensure all patients have access
• Leverage AI-enabled tools to design a hybrid care delivery model that will identify the appropriate form of care delivery for each patient and each episode of care
• Automate systematic monitoring and evaluation of care delivery via telemedicine based on the Donabedian framework to build the evidence for quality, efficient, and effective care delivery
• Facilitate patient engagement and capture of patient-generated health data, such as patient-reported outcomes

Source:  Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.