Cathleen Wheatley Wheatley and Catherine Fernald are two esteemed leaders that are discussing telehealth strategies for clinical leaders. Cathleen Wheatley is the President of Atrium Health, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Western North Carolina. Catherine Fernald is the Chief Nursing Officer for Christiana Care in Delaware. They discuss what is still missing from the conversation today in regards to successful telehealth strategies within hospitals.
Challenges and Opportunities for Telehealth
Reimbursement, regulation, and infrastructure are all major impediments to telehealth. Change management within healthcare is also an issue that needs to be addressed. Health systems need to look at new opportunities to generate revenue for telehealth services and consider risk arrangements in order to deliver more cost effective care. CMS has approved hospital at home programs for hundreds of hospitals nationwide, and it is recommended that every health system should consider these programs as they have achieved great success for specific populations.
We can't imagine that hospital at home is not here to stay. The demonstrations have proven this success and the affordability of this model. In the UK, they are way ahead of us, with 40-50 virtual ward beds available per 100,000 residents by the end of 2023. This was made possible through their payment model. To stay competitive, healthcare systems are partnering with retail partners like Best Buy, to provide the devices needed for hospital at home environments. Additionally, care models are evolving to keep up with young patients who are accessing their care in different ways.
The Role of Virtual Nursing
Health systems are evolving to keep up with the changing healthcare needs of younger generations. In order to stay competitive, healthcare needs to provide virtual environments that are convenient and accessible and create relationships with patients in order to build trust. Virtual nursing is a way to contemporize nursing practice and meet the needs of the growing healthcare demand.
Virtual nurses can help to reduce the workload for nurses by taking over some of the more repetitive tasks, such as admissions and discharge teaching. This will help to retain nurses and improve patient experience scores. There are many systems implementing virtual nurse programs across the country, and it is becoming increasingly popular. To help with adoption, nursing schools need to incorporate virtual nursing into their curriculums.
Addressing Challenges in ED Practice
Catherine and Cathleen discussed how they use coordinators and universal acceptors to ensure that patients are admitted to the right programs, in order to reduce variation and stress for ED providers. They also spoke about the changing ED practice due to an increase in workplace violence and behavioral health pandemics.
Note: This is an AI generated transcript, not edited by a staff writer and is solely intended for educational purposes. If you have any questions/concerns, reach out to events@beckershealthcare.com
This panel was live on 04/05/2023 at the event listed here.
If you are interested in event like this, you can visit our Upcoming Conferences.