Patients

COVID-19 is frequently attributed with introducing healthcare providers to the world of telehealth, but for a hospital system serving patients in Colorado and Kansas, the expansion of telehealth has been the norm for almost a decade.

With growth comes a need to negotiate space in tight hospital settings. HealthONE’s remedy was to bring all telehealth under one roof at their Denver headquarters by creating the Virtual Care Center.

From Dr. Steven Hansen’s Arizona Humane Society office, you may have heard a sigh of relief when Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs signed Senate Bill 1053 into law on May 9. Beginning in August, veterinarians licensed in the state will legally be able to provide veterinary care through telemedicine, a care alternative many have become accustomed to on the human side of healthcare.

Currently, there’s a six-week waiting list for pet owners who need the Humane Society’s subsidized services at their clinics in Maricopa County. Bringing telemedicine into the picture will make a difference.

It’s tough to believe that almost 10 years ago, we began to realize a substantial cure for hepatitis C was just around the corner. When the ION-3 study results came out about the medication combination sofosbuvir/ledipasvir, there was a tangible sense that we were about to have an achievable cure.

Step forward to the present day. A handful of innovative new treatments have come and gone, leaving us with powerful options including two that can cover all the virus’s genotypes in one fell swoop.

The remarkable lifelong health benefits of breastfeeding for both a breastfeeding parent and their child are well-known, and include a reduced risk of obesity, diabetes, breast cancer, early childhood illnesses and autoimmune diseases, to name just a few. Most new parents intend to breastfeed their child, and 83.2% of newborns in the US start out receiving some breastmilk initially, but according to the CDC’s 2022 Breastfeeding Report Card, only 24.9% of infants in the United States are exclusively breastfed at 6 months of age as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Early in the Covid lockdown in Las Vegas, Dr. Luis H. Medina-Garcia was front and center of almost every press conference and community conversation.

The public health emergency (PHE) put the infectious diseases specialist at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada in the middle of Clark County’s planning and communication efforts and forced him and his colleagues to finally take that deep dive into an area of practice they had eagerly discussed many years prior to the pandemic–telemedicine.

In April 2017 Summit Healthcare started a multi-disciplinary program to treat patients with chronic and acute pain in the White Mountains of Arizona. Our patient service area is HRSA-designated as having a shortage of providers and medically underserved. The area is the size of Rhode Island and includes Native American reservations and other vulnerable populations. Many of our patients live in a high poverty area which makes access to care challenging.

Medicare and Medicaid – two important programs for paying for health care for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) people. As we near the end of the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE), it’s going to be important to understand the differences between these programs and how they may impact reimbursements for telehealth services moving forward. Understanding these differences will be important for understanding the next steps for continuing to get reimbursed and any challenges that may be encountered in that process.

After a Veteran gets milk from the dairy aisle, and some bread from the bakery section, he stops at the ATLAS pod in Walmart and has a healthcare visit with his/her mental health, specialty, or medical provider.

In hopes of sparking renewed commitment to applying improvement science to telehealth, we offer this Telehealth QI and QA Miniseries. Today is the third in the series.

Recall that data can come in many forms and doesn’t have to be a report out of your electronic medical record (EHR). It can be hashmarks, start-end times, glass globs in a jar and more. I’m not kidding about glass globs. Once when I visited the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) there were two jars; one was labeled “Having a good day” the other was labeled “Having a bad day”. Each person who checked in at reception put a glob in the jar that reflected how their day was going.

At this time of year, I feel it is important to take the time and reflect on what makes us happy, and what we are you thankful for. I am truly thankful for my family and friends. I am also thankful to be working in telehealth with the Southwest Telehealth Resource Center. Through telehealth I’ve met some amazing people and I’ve reached out to some of them and asked them to help celebrate this season of Thanksgiving by sharing what they are thankful for. Hopefully their thoughts will inspire some of you and maybe even make you smile. All of us at SWTRC wish you and yours a wonderful thanksgiving holiday!