With the spread of COVID-19, strict social distancing and shelter-in-place policies, the practice of working remotely and implementing applications that limit in-person interaction have become the new norm.
Hospitals and health systems are at the forefront of this shift, and many are struggling with managing the IT infrastructural challenges created by the sudden massive demand for remote technology needed to cope with the global crisis.
Those able to work remote may not be used to working outside of the office, nor do they have the proper equipment or office space to comfortably and efficiently work from home.
We assume that in 2020 each employee has access to a decent internet connection, but how can you really make sure they do? What about your infrastructure? Are you confident that your systems currently in place can withstand a different workflow? Do you have the right security measures in place? How do you trust that your employees are still being productive?
As health organizations continue to provide the same high quality of care and service while also keeping clinicians safe and healthy, we see IT challenges arising in numerous areas. While there is a great deal of depth to this topic, the following outlines a few of the major considerations for health organizations and IT teams shifting to a remote workforce.
Infrastructure Capacity
When was the last time you evaluated key areas and were provided with recommendations for improvements in your IT environment? Take this opportunity to ensure you have the systems in place to facilitate strategic shifts and new initiatives like working remotely.
Network and remote access: to meet dynamic business needs, an organization’s network environment needs to be efficiently architected to facilitate high-performance at the right cost. As end users and devices accessing a network remotely increase, this service becomes a more important and critical responsibility. Optimize and manage bandwidth to ensure your network can withstand the rapid influx of traffic. Also, don’t forget to account for the number of licenses you will need to support your remote connections.
Virtual desktop infrastructure: remote workers can be deployed faster and supported more easily by using a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDI allows for a consistent and simplified computing environment both locally and remotely. With VDI, IT support staff are better equipped to manage desktop computing due to centralized management tools that ease the burden of software updates, endpoint security, end-user support, endpoint replacement and future expansion
By Juan Pablo Segura, president and co-founder, Babyscripts
Juan Pablo Segura
In the past several months, novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) has risen from humble beginnings in a Wuhan farmer’s market to international status: dominating the news cycle, exhausting the world’s hand sanitizer resources, and generally monopolizing the mental real estate of the developed world.
As new cases continue to be identified in the U.S., politicians are giving coronavirus the attention it deserves, responding to initial accusations of inadequacy with proposals for funding and reimbursements for testing and other precautionary measures.
One of the primary targets of this emergency funding is telehealth. New York’s Governor Cuomo and the NY Department of Financial services released a directive encouraging insurers to develop telehealth programs with participating providers.
Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego announced he was introducing a bill that would allow Medicaid to cover all COVID-19-related charges, including virtual appointments.
Major health industry groups like the Connected Health Initiative and the American Medical Association advocated for the Department of Health and Human Services to expand access to telehealth and offer Medicaid reimbursements for telemedicine in emergency situations.
Many have cited this pandemic as the “put me in coach” moment for telehealth — digital innovation that has lagged in adoption because of cumbersome restrictions, red tape, and lack of funding, among other things. And it’s obvious why telehealth is the tool for this moment.
At its most basic level, telehealth can provide accurate information about the virus — what it is, what the symptoms are, and how to protect against it. It’s low-hanging fruit in the rank of benefits, as disinformation seems to be spreading faster than the virus itself.
A local Costco suffered a run on toilet paper and paper towels, while the soap aisle remained surprisingly undisturbed: “Are we prepping for a snowstorm or a virus?” one shopper wondered.
A viral (no pun intended) tweet from CNN stated that “38% of Americans wouldn’t buy Corona beer ‘under any circumstances’ because of the coronavirus.” The tweet sparked a rash of sardonic responses. “Thirty-eight percent of Americans shouldn’t be allowed to roam free,” wrote one Twitter user.
The statistic was later debunked in a statement by the CEO of Corona, but it proves how quickly and easily even the most ridiculous rumors can take hold in panic mode.
The simple security of receiving information from a trusted care provider through a mobile app or text notification can dramatically reduce the panic that rises from disinformation, and clear up confusion around prevention and precautions (and what beer you should be avoiding).
By Matt Henry, senior manager consultant, Denver, Point B; Talia Avci, managing consultant, Chicago, Point B; and Ashley Fagerlie, managing consultant, Phoenix, Point B.
As the COVID-19 crisis disrupts traditional care delivery, digital tools such as telehealth are making it possible to deliver care outside your facility’s walls. Here’s how to prepare your organization both now and in the future.
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare has literally left the building. With millions of Americans under orders to stay home, in-person care delivery and elective procedures have been effectively shut down, elevating the need for alternative care delivery options.
Health systems are in a crisis, balancing heroic action to ramp up and support their communities through the COVID pandemic with existential threats to established service line revenue and cost structures. The importance of using technology to extend reach and effectiveness of your mission has never been greater.
While other industries have spent years disrupting traditional operating models to deliver online engagement to meet customer needs, healthcare has lagged due to many practical, economic, regulatory, cultural and quality of care reasons.
As health systems prepared for a surge in infectious patients, many have leveraged their digital front door as a way to deliver credible information, guide care, and deliver safe and effective services to patients.
Taking lessons learned, the time is now to plan for your post-COVID plans and how your digital front door can extend your mission as you intentionally re-open your care facilities.
Re-imagine access: As you build your strategy, consider how new front door solutions are being offered by non-traditional ‘providers’, like Anthem, Walgreens and CVS/Aetna, to address gaps in the primary care landscape.
These gaps include inaccurate online health information, lack of access to personal health information, long wait times for appointments, lack of price transparency and other issues that impact patients along their care journey.
Barriers can be addressed by tools that assist in triaging, medication adherence, capacity management as well as two-way patient communication via websites, patient portals and apps.
Anthem has partnered with a digital health start-up, K Health, to offer symptom triaging to their 40 million members to provide care guidance and access. Members provide their symptoms to an AI-enabled algorithm and can text directly with providers for advice. Walgreens, with locations that are accessible by 78% of the U.S. population, has launched Find Care, which offers everything from lab tests to virtual consults.
CVS/Aetna has spent nearly 10 years building out digital health tools, focusing on medication adherence, with the power to leverage data as a pharmacy, payer and retail clinic to connect with their patients. Other organizations are launching chat bots for assessments and triage or more deeply leveraging remote patient monitoring for care. Each of these digital front door tools is changing how patients access care.
The scale of the coronavirus pandemic is impacting every facet of daily life. As COVID-19 continues its global spread, authorities are restricting large gatherings of people and enforcing stay at home protocols. This crisis is forcing us to adapt to a “new normal,” and technology is taking center stage to help us through the transition.
In fact, as the popularity and usefulness of video delivery over the internet grows, reports reveal that live streaming has already attracted 47% more users than this time last year. Through the influx of telehealth, remote learning, remote video conferencing and canceled events, live streaming has become a versatile — and essential — tool that is changing the way we stay in contact with others, particularly in the age of social distancing.
Live streaming is gaining in popularity across many different industries. Until the advent of live streaming technologies, 911 operators only had one source of information to assess an emergency situation: the caller. Now, thanks to advances in live streaming technologies, 911 operators are empowered with unprecedented access to emergency situations via live video.
Carbyne, a technology company that delivers actionable data from connected mobile devices to emergency communications centers, uses live streaming to enhance critical response capabilities. Through the combination of real-time video and location data, Carbyne provides emergency personnel with a more accurate assessment of the scene before they arrive, reducing emergency response times by more than 60%.
While Carbyne’s technology has proven beneficial across the globe for several years, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought additional benefits to the technology. Carbyne is effectively able to remotely evaluate potential COVID-19 cases and forward potentially infected individuals to medical professionals via telehealth services while maintaining HIPAA compliance.
Additionally, the Carbyne platform has been used in some cities to help track COVID-19 cases, delivering a heat map that details coronavirus-related calls so the municipality can better allocate resources and prevent the disease from spreading. As one hotspot hit hard by the virus, New Orleans uses Carbyne’s COVID-19 service to manage emergency calls and help individuals who have contracted the virus contact telehealth professionals instead of flooding emergency rooms. Carbyne has been fielding 70% of the city’s emergency calls, a majority of which were related to COVID-19 symptoms.
By Heather Annolino, senior director healthcare practice, Ventiv.
As hospitals are working vigorously to address the health care needs of its patient population during the COVID-19 pandemic, they are unintentionally leaving themselves and their patients exposed to cybersecurity risks.
Measures implemented to protect workers and patients, including expanded use of telehealth and telemedicine, remote work and bringing new equipment such as ventilators online can leave data exposed, and institutions vulnerable to hackers and scammers. These cyberattacks can affect supply chains and the ability to leverage healthcare data from the COVID-19 pandemic for use in the future for other crises.
In March 2020, the Office for Civil Rights announced it would not enforce penalties for HIPAA noncompliance against providers leveraging telehealth platforms that may not comply with privacy regulations. This measure rapidly expanded the use of telehealth and telemedicine over the past several weeks, allowing providers to utilize videoconferencing platforms, including WebEx, Zoom and Skype.
The use of telemedicine improves patient access and assists with alleviating the additional burden on healthcare systems by limiting in-person care during the COVID-19 pandemic. If any incidents do occur, they should be entered into the facility’s health care risk management/patient safety software system. This technology is designed to help healthcare organizations see all of their data in one place, making it easier to learn from the incidents through analysis. While doing that now might be difficult, it is essential to capture this data to improve preparation for the next disaster and prevent patient harm.
Although telemedicine presents a lower risk from a risk management perspective, it is still important to provide consistent processes and protections to mitigate potential threats. During these uncertain times, telemedicine is the best option for providers to continue treating select segments of their patient population, as well as triage potential COVID-19 cases. Whether health care organizations are looking to expand (or even begin) the use of telemedicine capabilities, it is crucial to outline best practices for consent, credentialing, and security and privacy to assist with mitigating potential risks.
Here are a few strategies facilities should consider:
Security and Privacy
Under normal circumstances, healthcare facilities have difficulty bringing key equipment online securely. As facilities are currently working tirelessly to address COVID-19 patients’ needs in addition to continuing to provide care to non-COVID-19 patients, there is a potential increase of security risks as additional medical equipment and medical IoT devices integrate into the network.
By investing in and deploying cybersecurity procedures and protections, including backup and downtime procedures, healthcare facilities can reduce the risk of potential phishing and ransomware attempts. These measures should include ensuring all practitioners are using communication apps recommended by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services Office for Civil Rights and secure telephone connections as well.
By Guljeet Nagpaul, chief product officer, ACCELQ.
COVID-19 has taken a heavy toll on the U.S. and the world.
Cases and deaths continue to rise as major global economies slide into recession – or worse.
One rare, but burgeoning area of positive growth in the pandemic is telehealth. Medical services and data shares electronically has stood tall during the current health crisis.
According to data from Mordor Intelligence, the global telehealth market will grow to an estimated value of $66 billion by 2021.
Telehealth is particularly growing in data-intensive healthcare industry sectors like record-keeping, telehealth sessions and virtual, video-based doctor appointments, and the surging e-prescription sector, where physicians are increasingly able to issue prescriptions via a mobile app.
The healthcare industry is also experiencing a rise in digital epidemiology tools, chatbot systems, EHR guidance tools and rapid-response COVID-19 testing kits, among other digital-based solutions.
These tools are increasingly needed by health care practitioners to stem the COVID-19 tide – and any delays getting them into health professionals hands is a delay that coronavirus caretakers and patients can’t afford to take.
A Need for Testing and Quality Assurance
Still, even at a time of pandemic, those delays are only all too real – and the problem often lies in the archaic structure of the health care sector.
Case in point. While the coronavirus crisis has driven the need for new digital tools that have fueled a health care system transformation, the bureaucratic rigidity the health care still exists. Even as digital tools recast the entire health industry model, old problems remain, especially in the centralized and technologically inefficient modes of data management.
That’s where good data software testing and quality assurance come into play, in the form of test automation. As automation becomes the software development standard for revenue-minded companies, regular testing is required to make sure productivity and security activities are above board, and is critical in getting the digital healthcare products and services out the door and into hospitals and care centers as quickly as possible.
In the past few months, telehealth services have helped many to obtain medical services and avoid exposure to COVID-19 while freeing up resources for those facing graver conditions. This is a great example of an unexpected circumstance quickening the adoption of new technology that will remain after the crisis has passed, but the rapid adoption has also overwhelmed telehealth services, illustrating the importance of network resilience.
Telehealth is just one relatively new application of technology that’s part of a constantly growing repertoire of connected tools. To provide optimal patient care, healthcare ecosystems require constant connectivity to many other bandwidth-intensive applications, such as IoT devices, systems to process patient data via electronic health records (EHR) and picture archiving systems (PACS). With experts predicting the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) market to be worth $158.1 billion USD by 2022 (Deloitte), we can only expect this trend to grow.
With all these new advancements come new risks. Healthcare systems are comprised of multiple facilities, such as hospitals, labs and urgent care units that all have multi-point connectivity requirements. This requires higher capacity wide area networks (WAN) – often in the form of software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN). If one of these points loses connectivity for reasons like a cyber-attack, an interoperability issue or a bad SD-WAN router update, the entire network could go offline.
To keep healthcare networks running, organizations need intelligent systems and processes to monitor every piece of equipment, prevent issues, and recover from incidents quickly. This will ensure the secure, always-on availability needed to decrease costs, meet strict regulatory requirements, and improve patient experiences.
Top challenges that can bring your healthcare network down
Three large challenges healthcare organizations face are protecting data, staying online during network consolidations, and unexpected incidents like natural disasters or physical equipment disruptions. These could all bring the primary network offline.
Cyber criminals constantly seek to breach data networks and harvest patient data. In this regard, ransomware attacks, which are primarily transmitted through spam/phishing or other manipulations of unprepared users operating in the primary data plane, cause many healthcare enterprises to shut down computer systems, including their EHR. No topic is off limits to hackers, and even in the past few months, research has revealed phrases like “corona” or “covid” have been featured in spam emails (RiskIQ).
Weather a health system is seeking to modernize its infrastructure or a merger has led to a large transformation, consolidating networks can also be a challenge, requiring the migration of a multitude of apps and hardware components that must stay online at all times and integrate with one another in a cohesive system.
Lastly, unexpected outages from physical events can bring a system offline by disrupting vulnerable points like last mile connections. In this regard, a wide range of network components, such as cable interconnects, switches, power supplies, storage arrays, or chillers could present problems. To support new technologies, network environments are only becoming more complex, which means more software stacks that are frequently updated and susceptible to exploits, bugs and cyberattacks.
By Nadia de la Houssaye, co-leader healthcare litigation team and head of the healthcare industry telemedicine team, Jones Walker LLP.
Nadia de la Houssaye
At its most fundamental, telehealth (or telemedicine) is nothing new. What is new is the confluence of technology development and the rapidly escalating demands being placed on healthcare providers in the face of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) — and regulators’ willingness to bend, loosen, or change rules that previously slowed the expansion of telehealth services.
Taken together, these three factors have created an opportunity to demonstrate the value of telehealth to providers, the public, and regulators, and to cement telehealth’s place in the delivery of healthcare services.
In particular, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has taken an unprecedented position in its effort to utilize telehealth as one of the country’s greatest weapons to not only flatten the new-infection curve, but to also address return-to-work screening needs, including antibody testing. Americans desperately need to return to work and CMS’ encouraged use and expanded coverage for COVID-19 diagnostic testing, at no cost to the insured, will hopefully aid in expediting safe return-to-work policies.
The bottom line? CMS is granting providers a tremendous amount of leeway and it is imperative that we take advantage of this opportunity to change the face of telehealth post-COVID-19.
Since early March 2020, CMS and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Department of Health and Human Services-Office for Civil Rights (HHS-OCR), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), and numerous other federal and state agencies have issued a steady flow of guidance easing previous restrictions that constrained the use of telehealth technology. Taking a step further, many have also announced programs and procured funding to better support the use of telehealth to provide essential care to communities, families, and individuals.
As states and cities began announcing shelter-in-place requirements and guidelines, on Mar. 16, Mar. 17, and Mar. 20, 2020, HHS-OCR likewise began issuing bulletins, notifications, and FAQs announcing the decision by HHS Secretary Alex Azar to waive certain HIPAA and HITECH Act non-compliance sanctions and penalties against covered entities and providers using, among other options, telehealth and non-public facing technologies for remote communications (including good-faith use of video applications such as Zoom, Skype, and FaceTime).
As the COVID-19 crisis disrupts traditional care delivery, digital tools such as telehealth are making it possible to deliver care outside your facility’s walls. Here’s how to prepare your organization both now and in the future.
Cases and deaths continue to rise as major global economies slide into recession – or worse.
In the past few months, telehealth services have helped many to obtain medical services and avoid exposure to COVID-19 while freeing up resources for those facing graver conditions. This is a great example of an unexpected circumstance quickening the adoption of new technology that will remain after the crisis has passed, but the rapid adoption has also 