Telehealth: The necessity and rapid adoption of virtual visits

While telehealth has slowly gained traction in recent years, the COVID-19 crisis has made it an indispensable part of patient care overnight. It is being used by virtually all of our health system partners to assess patients with COVID-19 and replace traditional office visits where possible. Keeping patients out of clinics and hospitals is key to reducing risk for patients and staff alike.

From rapid deployment of teleconferencing tools like Zoom, to telemedicine tools within the EHR to third party solutions (e.g., Amwell), health systems across the country are embracing telehealth more rapidly than ever before. With hospital censuses low - for now - largely due to elimination of elective surgeries, many have found they have physicians with capacity to support patients virtually. With partners like Amwell, ramping up to outsource telehealth using physicians located outside of the health system is a viable option should a surge in patient volume require it.

University of Kentucky Healthcare was adopting telemedicine through an urgent care clinic (jointly staffed by IMG, OB/GYN and Peds) prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Due to the urgency of the situation, rolling it out more broadly was prioritized and UK Healthare launched telehealth capabilities at all 80 of its clinics just this week. This is one example of many in which hard work and innovation by these dedicated IT teams have resulted in accomplishing exceptional results in record time.