Virtual health care visits how to#

The greatest adoption of this program to date has been in our medical and surgical specialties, as well as in psychiatry.Īs we grow this program, we plan to evaluate its value in a number of innovative ways. From a population health perspective, where our goal was to remove some of the lower-value in-person visits to make room in our providers’ schedules for more-complicated cases, we were encouraged to find that 87% of patients said they would have needed to come into the office to see a provider face to face if it weren’t for their virtual visit. Among patients surveyed after their initial encounter, 97% were satisfied with the experience and would recommend the program, and 74% felt that the interaction actually improved their relationship with their provider, allaying some of our concerns that what patients would gain in convenience they would lose in a remote interaction. Insight CenterĮxploring cutting edge ways to lower costs and improve quality.Īpproximately 600 visits have been conducted virtually through this program to date, freeing up about 200 hours for participating providers to see patients. And we chose providers willing to open up their schedules to see patients virtually, either more efficiently during their clinical hours or during their non-clinical time. We specifically focused on patients who would not need to come into the office for in-person care in addition to receiving virtual care, so as to avoid increasing overall utilization. In addition to working with participating providers to target clinical populations for whom virtual care would be appropriate, we asked providers to offer virtual visits to align with BWH population health and access goals. Providers were compensated at a rate roughly commensurate with routine office-based billing, regardless of payer mix.

Virtual health care visits how to#

We outfitted exam rooms and provider offices with cameras and trained the providers how to use a secure video platform to connect with patients remotely, while designing practice workflows to effectively move patients through the program. While a broad set of patients met these conditions, our providers targeted those with inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes during pregnancy, mood disorders, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, prostate disease, and airway disorders. In 2015 we started to engage those clinical departments whose providers saw patients with conditions requiring frequent follow-up visits and infrequent physical exams, and who lived in Massachusetts but had difficulty coming into the office. Our virtual care strategy began with video-based visits for outpatients with chronic diseases. Virtual Visits: Improving Access and Population Health in Chronic Disease Management

Here is what we did at BWH, organized by the three clinical and strategic problems we aimed to solve through virtual care. Our strategy has been guided by nuanced answers to these questions.

How can this value be assessed from the patient’s perspective as well as the organization’s?.

How does virtual care create value for my practice or organization?.

Should telehealth programs be offered directly to patients or only among providers?.

Which technology tools will meet the demographic, clinical, and business needs for these services?.

Which clinical services should be offered virtually, and why?.

For smaller or community-based providers, this gap is even wider.įor virtual care to move from an innovation pilot to a standard service, five questions need to be answered by any provider: In spite of this growing buzz, however, virtual care at our institution and most other academic medical centers remains more of a future vision than a daily reality. As Medical Director for Telehealth at BWH as well as the Partners Healthcare Center for Population Health, I rarely go a week without hearing about a new practice interested in offering one of our virtual care services, a patient inquiry about our telehealth programs, or a significant change in the reimbursement landscape that may affect virtual care delivery. Like many hospitals, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) is actively preparing for the era of virtual care in order to best meet our patients’ needs. As more commercial and state payers offer telehealth coverage and patients come to expect virtual care as standard practice, meeting the demand is quickly becoming clinically and financially imperative. But for an industry reliant on, and in many ways limited by, brick-and-mortar facilities, this movement will mean significant disruption for providers. Few recent trends in health care delivery have more power to improve population health, patient and provider experience, and hospital business models than virtual care.