Page 8 - Healthcare News July-August 2020

more than anything else, about preserving beds to treat an unpredictable pandemic. Now that the infection rate is being ef-
fectively controlled, he explained, hospitals are trying to communicate the message that they are safe places to visit — with plenty of strict protocols in place, from masking to social distancing to constant sanitizing — for patients who need to be seen.
DiStefano said the challenge has been ramping services back up — and bringing back furloughed workers — to match what is proving to be pent-up demand, but in a measured way. “It’s a delicate balance — how do we do this to best serve the com- munity?”
It’s a long road back from the volume lows of the spring, when physician revenue dropped by 50. They’re now back around 65%, and inpatient beds are at about
80% of capacity. But people with serious health concerns should not put off care, he stressed, especially since the hospital has been diligent about infection protocols and keeping COVID-suspected patients sepa- rated from the rest.
“We take great pains to keep this envi- ronment safe,” he said. “The message to the community is, ‘if you are hurt, if you have a condition, this is a safe place to come.’”
Carl Cameron says the technol- ogy needed for effective tele- health exists, and so does patient demand.
“Obviously, with COVID, nobody wanted to leave their house — as a country, we didn’t have a good understanding of how the disease spread; everyone was saying shelter in place, so people didn’t really want to go out.”
It helps, he added, to be affiliated with a larger system, Trinity Health, and while Mercy has rarely seen the kind of financial deficit it faced this spring, its leaders are still doing what they can to meet commu- nity health needs.
“We are the fabric of the community; there are no concerns about Mercy’s fu- ture,” DiStefano told HCN. “We are going
track to be covered by insurance payers in the future much more consistently than before.
“This has become more of a platform that allows us to reach out to patients,” said DiStefano, whose background in telemedi- cine goes back to the 1990s. “I hope it’s a bigger part of healthcare going forward. Obviously, you have to do some testing in
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to be here for many years to come. For- tunately, we have the backing of a larger organization, and that helps a lot.”
Distance Learning
If there is an upside to navigating the pandemic, he said it might be the growing importance of telehealth, which became not just a convenient tool for providers and patients over the past few months, but a critical one — and one that seems to be on
the office, but you can do preliminary or follow-up appointments with telehealth, and that reduces the volume of patients in the waiting room and the physical office, which allows us to have a much cleaner, COVID-free environment to keep those people safe.”
In short, it’s a way to boost volume — and revenues — while making patients who do go to the hospital feel more secure.
Carl Cameron, chief operating officer at Holyoke Medical Center, agreed. “We were using it wherever possible and where the government would allow us to get paid for it. Obviously, with COVID, nobody wanted to leave their house — as a country, we didn’t have a good un- derstanding of how the disease spread; everyone was saying shelter in place, so people didn’t really want to go out.
As a result, while practices saw signifi- cant dips in volume, “as we put the tele- medicine in place, I was eventually able to bring us up to just below pre-COVID
numbers for office visits. We still had some patients, depending on the acuity, who needed to be seen in the office or the ER, but we were doing 75% to 80% of our visits via telemedicine.”
Among the physicians pleased with the expansion of telehealth is Dr. Kartik
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