Metro Health/University of Michigan Health is an osteopathic teaching hospital serving more than 250,000 patients in western Michigan each year.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, Metro Health had been exploring telemedicine and remote patient monitoring (RPM) providers for the past two years. The team believes that telemedicine and RPM will be the future of healthcare services, but they are taking time to outline the current challenges, planned goals and their telemedicine/RPM platform needs to meet these challenges and goals.
The initial telemedicine/RPM program focused on patients with congestive heart failure-high-risk patients who have recently been discharged from the hospital, who are at risk of adverse consequences such as readmission or emergency visits. This was the initial expected goal of the plan-to reduce hospitalization by 30 days.
“It is important for us that the implementation of the telemedicine/RPM program will provide the best patient experience,” said Dr. Lance M. Owens, Metro Health’s Chief Medical Information Officer and Chief of Family Medicine.
“As an organization, we focus on the experience of patients and providers, so a user-friendly platform is necessary. We need to be able to explain to providers and employees how this will ease their daily workload while enhancing patient care.”
Specifically for COVID-19, Michigan began to experience its first large-scale case surge in November 2020.
Owens recalled: “We soon had an average of approximately 7,000 new cases per day across the state. Because of this rapid increase, we faced similar challenges that many hospitals faced throughout the pandemic.” “As the number of cases increases, We have also seen an increase in the number of inpatients, which has affected the bed capacity of our hospital.
“The increase in the number of hospitalizations will not only increase your bed capacity, it will also affect the nursing rate, requiring nurses to take care of more patients than usual at one time,” he continued.
“In addition, this pandemic has raised concerns about isolation and its effects on the physical and mental health of patients. Patients isolated in hospitals are experiencing this negative impact, which is another driving factor in the provision of home care. COVID-19 patients .”
Metro Health faces some challenges that need to be addressed: limited beds, cancellation of elective surgery, patient isolation, staffing ratio, and employee safety.
“We are lucky that this surge occurred in the second half of 2020, where we have a better grasp of the treatment of COVID-19, but we know that we need to transfer these patients out of the hospital to relieve some of the pressure on bed capacity and personnel Equipped,” Owens said. “That’s when we determined that we need a COVID-19 outpatient plan.
“Once we decide that we need to provide home care for COVID-19 patients, the question becomes: What tools do we need to monitor the patient’s recovery from home?” He continued. “We are fortunate that our affiliate Michigan Medicine has partnered with Health Recovery Solutions and is using their telemedicine and RPM platform to discharge COVID-19 patients from the hospital and monitor them at home.”
He added that Metro Health knows that Health Recovery Solutions will have the technology and tools needed for such programs.
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Metro Health’s telemedicine and RPM platform for monitoring COVID-19 patients has several key functions: biometrics and symptom monitoring, medication and monitoring reminders, patient communication via voice calls and virtual visits, and COVID-19 care planning.
The COVID-19 care plan allows staff to customize the reminders, symptom surveys, and educational videos they send to patients to ensure that all needed patient data is collected.
“We recruited approximately 20-25% of Metro Health’s COVID-19 patients in the telemedicine and RPM programs,” Owens said. “Residents, intensive care physicians, or care management teams evaluate the eligibility of patients to ensure that they meet certain eligibility criteria. For example, one criterion that a patient must meet is the family support system or nursing staff.
“Once these patients have undergone eligibility assessment and participated in the program, they will receive training on the platform before they are discharged-how to record their vital signs, answer symptom surveys, answer voice and video calls, etc.,” he said. carry on. “Specifically, we let patients restore body temperature, blood pressure and blood oxygen levels every day.”
On days 1, 2, 4, 7 and 10 of enrollment, patients participated in the virtual visit. In the days when patients do not have a virtual visit, they will receive a voice call from the team. If the patient has any questions or concerns, the staff also encourages the patient to call or text the team via the tablet. This has a major impact on patient compliance.
Starting with patient satisfaction, Metro Health recorded 95% of patient satisfaction among COVID-19 patients who participated in the telemedicine and RPM programs. This is a key indicator of Metro Health because its mission statement puts the patient experience first.
Included in the telemedicine platform, patients complete a patient satisfaction survey before exiting the program. In addition to simply asking “Are you satisfied with the telemedicine plan,” the survey also included questions that staff used to help assess the success of the telemedicine plan.
The staff asked the patient: “Due to the telemedicine plan, do you feel more involved in your care?” and “Will you recommend the telemedicine plan to your family or friends?” and “Is the equipment easy to use?” It is important to evaluate Metro Health’s patient experience.
“For the number of days saved in the hospital, you can use many indicators to analyze this number,” Owens said. “From a basic level, we want to compare the length of stay of hospitalized COVID-19 patients with the length of stay of our telemedicine program for COVID-19 patients at home. Essentially, for each patient you can receive treatment at home telemedicine, Avoid hospitalization in the hospital.”
Finally, patient compliance. Metro Health requires patients to record their blood pressure, blood oxygen level and body temperature every day. The organization’s compliance rate for these biometrics has reached 90%, which means that at the time of registration, 90% of patients are recording their biometrics every day. The recording is critical to the success of the show.
Owens concluded: “These biometric readings give you a lot of understanding of the patient’s recovery and enable the program to send risk alerts when the patient’s vital signs are outside the predetermined range set by our team.” “These readings help us Assess the patient’s progress and identify deterioration to prevent hospitalization or emergency room visits.”
Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT Email the author: bsiwicki@himss.org Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS media publication.
Post time: Jul-01-2021