Shawn Valenta serves as Administrator of Telehealth at the Medical University of South Carolina.
Shawn 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 Shawn's session, click here.
Question: What tools do hospitals and health systems need to maintain telemedicine growth post-pandemic?
Shawn Valenta: There are a lot of telehealth solutions on the market, and the industry is actively consolidating in a race to become the first true enterprise platform. With that said, one of our mottos at the MUSC Center for Telehealth is 'think technology last'. Hospitals and health systems should really be focused on maturing their clinical telehealth strategy first, and from there, there will be plenty of HIPAA-compliant telehealth tools on the market to evaluate. While the reimbursement policy landscape is still not fully clear, I expect many health systems to push forward with their ambulatory telehealth strategies to bring more convenient care to their patients.
Q: What do clinicians want most from their telemedicine platforms?
SV: Clinicians want their telehealth visit to be as easy (or easier) than what they experience with an in-person encounter. We cannot provide our clinicians with only a video client and expect successful large scale adoption. Virtual clinics need to account for support mechanisms such as preparing patients for and reminding them of their visit, providing technical support for both the patient and provider, having back up plans if there is a technology issue, and formalizing a post-visit administrative process to assist with additional questions, orders or scheduling future appointments.
Q: Where is the biggest opportunity for telemedicine and how can hospitals and health systems best take advantage of it?
SV: Considering the continued challenges around national provider shortages, the biggest opportunity for telehealth is to leverage technology to completely redesign care delivery in a more efficient, effective way. This requires providers to really think about the actual goals of the clinical service and to create a workflow that optimizes asynchronous telehealth tools to achieve those goals. This is very different than traditional 'video visit' telemedicine that has really only used the technology to replicate care over distance. That old school way is great for improving access, but it does not generate any new efficiency within the system. We've had great success getting traditional 15-minute visits down to 90-second clinical decisions using asynchronous technologies.
Q: How can providers better navigate the digital divide to help vulnerable patient populations participate in virtual care?
SV: At the core of helping vulnerable patient populations is understanding what resources are available and what their access challenges are. When we established a statewide virtual screening process for COVID-19 in South Carolina, we saw over 30,000 patients on that online platform in the month of March, but our original solution was not usable for everyone. By the beginning of April, we also created an online Spanish version of our screening tool, and a couple of weeks later we rolled out a phone option for patients without internet access or who may have literacy challenges. In addition, we created a virtual screening process for some of our local homeless shelters. While the design of these solutions may be different, the goals are the same, and we demonstrated that these services can be standardized and scaled successfully.