Derek Streat serves as Chief Executive Officer at DexCare, a part of Providence.
Derek will speak at Becker's Healthcare Telehealth Virtual Forum. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the virtual event, which will take place on November 2-3, 2020.
To learn more about the conference and Derek's session, click here.
Question: What tools do hospitals and health systems need to maintain telemedicine growth post-pandemic?
Derek Streat: While COVID-19 has forced utilization and accelerated adoption of telemedicine across business lines, health systems are lacking the critical infrastructure to make telemedicine effective or scalable across their lines of business. Digitally-enabled care is now a strategic imperative for health systems—so adding technology that intelligently orchestrates and optimizes business operations—regardless of mode or venue of care, will be critical.
Q: What do clinicians want most from their telemedicine platforms?
DS: In a health system setting, it’s very important that clinicians utilize their existing systems and workflows. Now that telemedicine has become a requirement because of COVID, clinicians and their health systems will require their telemedicine solutions to support their quality standards, branding and communication standards, and integrate with their EMR.
Q: Where is the biggest opportunity for telemedicine and how can hospitals and health systems best take advantage of it?
DS: The opportunity is beyond the care mode or user experience alone – it’s about the potential impact digitally-enabled care can have on the health systems business model. With the right platform supporting their virtual care solutions, digitally-enabled care can offer a highly effective patient experience—increasing revenue from commercially-insured patients, while minimizing operations and administrative costs. But ultimately, digitally-enabled care will enable health systems to evolve their traditional, one-to-one, patient-to-provider relationships into a marketplace model where many providers can service a pool of patients to meet their diverse needs. When done right, the combination of forced utilization and increased acceptance of digitally-enabled care, plus demand across multiple service lines (not just retail) plus the rich data made available—will put the holy grail of “right care, right patient, right time” within reach for the first time.
Q: How can providers better navigate the digital divide to help vulnerable patient populations participate in virtual care?
DS: It’s all about access, navigation and optimization. We need to make quality health care simple to find, help patients get to the right care, and optimize the interaction so that it’s affordable for patients.