Reliant Medical Group, with multiple locations in Massachusetts, for example, announced to patients recently that it will postpone appointments for some routine and elective procedures, as determined by the group’s physicians and clinical staff.
“Taking this step will help limit the number of people passing through our facilities, which will help slow the spread of illness [as recommended by the CDC],” noted an email blast to patients.
3. Overcommunicate to patients
With a situation as dynamic and unprecedented as this, constant and clear communication with patients is crucial. “In general, in my experience, practices don’t realize how much communication is necessary,” said Morgan. “In order to be effective and get the word out, you have to be overcommunicating.”
Today’s practices have multiple ways to communicate to keep people informed, including email, text messaging, social media, patient portals, and even local television and radio.
One email or text message to the patient population can help direct them to the appropriate streams of information. Helping direct patients to updated information is critical.
In contrast, having the front desk field multitudes of calls from concerned patients ties up precious resources, according Siddiqui. “Right now, practices are absolutely inundated, patients are waiting on hold, and that creates a great deal of frustration,” he said.
“We really need to take a page from every other industry in the United States, and that is using secure SMS, email communication, and telehealth,” Siddiqui said. “Healthcare generally tends to be a laggard in this because so many people think, ‘Well, you can’t do that in healthcare,’ as opposed to thinking, ‘How can we do that in healthcare?’”
4. Take advantage of telemedicine
Fortunately, technology to interact with patients remotely is almost ubiquitous. Even for practices with little experience in this arena, various vendors exist that can get secure, HIPAA-compliant technologies up and running quickly.
Various payers have issued guidance regarding reimbursement for telemedicine specific to COVID-19, and on March 6, Congress passed a law regarding Medicare coverage and payment for virtual services during a government-declared state of emergency. Some of the rules about HIPAA compliance in telemedicine have been eased for this emergency.
But even with well-established telemedicine modalities in place, it’s crunch time for applying it to COVID-19. “You need to find a way to have telemedicine available and use it, because depending on how this goes, that’s going to be clearly the safest, best way to care for a huge number of people,” said Darryl Elmouchi, MD, MBA, chief medical officer of Spectrum Health System and president of Spectrum Health Medical Group in Michigan.
“What we recognize now, both with our past experience with telehealth for many years and specifically with this coronavirus testing we’ve done, is that it’s incredibly useful both for the clinicians and the patients,” Elmouchi said.
One possibility to consider is the tactic used by Spectrum, a large integrated healthcare system. The company mobilized its existing telemedicine program to offer free virtual screenings for anyone in Michigan showing possible symptoms of COVID-19. “We wanted to keep people out of our clinics, emergency rooms, and urgent care centers if they didn’t need to be there, and help allay fears,” he said.
Elmouchi said his company faced the problems that other physicians would also have to deal with. “It was a ton of work with a dedicated team that was focused on this. The hardest part was probably trying to determine how we can staff it,” he said.
With their dedicated virtual team still seeing regularly scheduled virtual patients, the system had to reassign its traditional teams, such as urgent care and primary care clinicians, to the virtual screening effort. “Then we had to figure out how we could operationalize it. It was a lot of work,” Elmouchi said.
Telemedicine capabilities are not limited to screening patients, but can also be used to stay in touch with patients who may be quarantined and provide follow-up care, he noted.