Telehealth

With the first cohort of patients onboarded for the RPM program, the center aims to achieve greater treatment compliance and drive oncology innovation with connected medical devices, a patient app and an integrated cloud-based clinician portal.

Dr. Salim Saiyed, UPMC Central Pennsylvania's CMIO, offers a detailed look at how the health system is deploying this advanced telehealth approach. He describes its challenges and benefits.

The nation is focusing on improving the output of care and quality outcomes by steering toward value-based models, says Dr. Ahmed Balkhair, chief digital health officer at Obeikan Investment Group and advisor to the National Health Information Center.

The American Telemedicine Association and its ATA Action subsidiary say requiring patients who initiated treatment by telehealth during the pandemic to visit a provider for prescriptions is overly restrictive and could cause harm.

A greater focus on care coordination and further embrace of telemedicine by payers will also be hallmarks this year, says one virtual care expert.

The hospital system will eliminate hardware costs with a virtual command center that uses advanced computer vision and AI technology to support patient care. 

OCHIN will assist with planning and developing blueprints that school administrators can use to connect students with healthcare providers and counselors via real-time video conferencing.

For pregnant and postpartum women, the Medical University of South Carolina has replaced face-to-face mental health screenings for stigmatized conditions with a text messaging-based telemedicine system.

The health system was using another telemedicine vendor's tools when the pandemic first hit. But it quickly saw what Zoom could do for virtual care innovation across several departments and specialties.