In this episode

Telehealth boomed overnight during the COVID-19 pandemic. But how has it grown, and what does telehealth look like today? Angela Skrzynski, DO is Virtua Health’s Lead Physician – Telehealth, and has led the development of a robust virtual care program at the organization. In this episode, she discusses the program and what makes it successful:

• Ensuring that patients have options to meet their needs and preferences, whether that means in-person or virtual care.
• Approaching virtual-first care with a hybrid model, where patients can be seen primarily via telehealth but come in when needed.
• Plan how you’ll let patients know about your virtual care options and provide technical support.

“Where we’ve landed at this point is helping to drive people to the right care at the right time…and we’re finding that you can utilize telemedicine so much more than you might have thought you could.”

– Dr. Angela Skrzynski

 

Key takeaways

Dr. Skrzynski shared how Virtua Health’s use of telehealth has evolved from the pandemic-era boom to now, and what she and the organization have learned about using it effectively to provide more flexible, consumer-focused care. Here are her takeaways:

Virtual care is a great way to provide consumer-focused convenience with the resources at hand.

“Virtua Health was at 28 encounters for telemedicine in 2019. In 202, it jumped to 180,000 or so encounters. It’s not a unique story, but it’s just incredible at a global scale how how digital health really exploded [during the COVID-19 pandemic],” Dr. Skrzynski said.“Although it may not have been the impetus that we wanted, it was really a driving force in moving digital care forward.”

“I think what’s important to note is that clinicians and patients were using digital health as a necessity at that time. And today, we’ve moved into a position where people are choosing telemedicine and digital care, and we’re still seeing a lot of desire for that type of convenience and access,” said Dr. Skrzynski.

“Digital solutions add so much to our our ability to care for patients, but you do have to select the correct patient at the right time and the right service for them,” she said.

A hybrid model makes virtual-first service lines or clinics possible.

“Where we’ve landed at this point is helping to drive people to the right care at the right time…and we’re finding that you can utilize telemedicine so much more than you might have thought you could,” said Dr. Skrzynski. “And the best way to do this in a lot of cases is with a hybrid model.” Dr. Skrzynski offered examples of how Virtua Health uses a hybrid model to deliver virtual-first (but not virtual-only) care.

“Our urgent care telehealth practice sees patients exclusively virtually in telemedicine. However, when you’re seen and we identify that you really need escalation, somebody’s gotta take a listen to those lungs or take a look in those ears. We have a process for doing that with an absolutely seamless transition to our in-person sites. There’s also in our primary care telehealth practice, which is a digital-first practice — meaning that we provide mainly telemedicine care, but we still offer in-person care.”

Dr. Skrzynski see this hybrid model as a clinical necessity for virtual-first service lines, especially as in-home technology adoption still has a was to go. “Sometimes, you get sick. You may need somebody to listen to lungs. And if you have a Bluetooth enabled stethoscope at home, great, but the vast majority of people today do not,” she said. “And so we’ve found that the hybrid approach to care that’s digital-first is really best.”

Plan for letting patients know about your virtual options and providing technical support.

Dr. Skrzynski points to patient support as the key for healthcare organizations that would like to do more with virtual care.

First, she said, “You’ve gotta have a support system for patients. We’ve got an incredible patient-facing technical support desk to help navigate patients through troubleshooting.”

Some examples include patients who need to reset access to their MyChart patient portal, or who need A/V help. “The clinician, that’s not their role,” she pointed out. “They don’t necessarily have the time or the knowledge to help a patient through that type of trouble. And so I think having that centralized area of expertise has been incredibly important.”

Next, she emphasized promoting the options that are available to your patients so they can take advantage of them. “As a consumer patient base, we’re all learning about the options that are available to us, how to use them, how to navigate them,” she said. “We’re working to do a lot of education.”

Dr. Skrzynski recommends making your virtual care options accessible to patients when they’re finding care. “When you’re designing your scheduling or educational tools, it’s imperative that you offer up digital. We’ve found that patients just by rote experience are selecting routine office visits in lieu of telemedicine visits even though we have more telemedicine availability. So we’re designing our scheduling pages to allow patients to be able to toggle between the in person and telemedicine availability much more easily so that they can really view all of their options at the same time,” she said.