Telehealth

In a new HIMSS TV series, the Oregon senator highlighted the importance of safeguarding access to telemedicine for mental health services.

At Ohio-based Harbor, telemedicine services are up 564% compared with 2019. From March to August this year, the provider treated 15,259 patients via remote consult with help from its Lighthouse Telehealth subsidiary.

The increased adoption of technology such as telemedicine is helping to open up innovation opportunities, says Infermedica CEO Piotr Orzechowski.

While more than half of the leaders polled say their telehealth experience has been a positive one, they saw some barriers too, including some patients' challenges using the new technologies.

Seamless workflow integration, better patient engagement, artificial intelligence utilization and "multidisciplinary group chat" – the sky's the limit when it comes to potential telemedicine innovations.

From managing cybersecurity imperatives with at-home patients as a new X factor to surfing the data tsunami of remote patient monitoring, experts from NIST, FCC, Mount Sinai, Yale, Leapfrog Group and others offer insights on demand.

For digital health services to work well, building community confidence in its usage through extensive testing is essential.

The American Telemedicine Association's comments focused on expanding telehealth access, changes to remote monitoring services, and the provision of telehealth in federally qualified health centers and rural health clinics.

Telehealth became a service that required a "clinical champion" to a necessary part of Yale New Haven Health Services' offerings, says Dr. Pam Hoffman, medical director of telehealth services at the health system.

The company also announced that Epic will be the first system to integrate its EHR with Microsoft Teams for telehealth virtual visits.