MORE TO TELEHEALTH THAN MEETS THE SCREEN
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Telehealth has become essential to American health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, but is it really the solution to our biggest access-to-care problems? by Abbie Roth
hen COVID-19 ignited stay-at-home orders, public and private insurers quickly relaxed the rules for covering telehealth visits. Health care systems responded in kind by rapidly expanding their telehealth capacity and training.
Expanding telehealth wasn’t as simple as giving the clinicians the “all clear.” “Telehealth is one of those things that has been evolving slowly over the last 15 to 20 years — especially in terms of using video in addition to voice,” says Jeffrey Hoffman, MD, chief medical information officer at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. “Before COVID-19, I thought that telehealth was a great idea with limited applications. I couldn’t imagine doing specialty care or gaining acceptance of telehealth from providers and patients across the board.”
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PediatricsNationwide.org | Fall/Winter 2020
After the pandemic hit, Dr. Hoffman says he was surprised at how quickly the initial reluctance and resistance faded away. “Groups and individuals who I never would have thought would embrace telehealth now talk about how they can’t imagine a world without it,” he says. Nationwide Children’s was a few months into a two-tothree-year plan to expand telehealth access across the institution. That plan was immediately fast tracked to bring providers in every outpatient service online for telehealth. Between mid-March and mid-June, more than 100,000 telehealth visits had been completed. “We talk a lot about ‘One Team’ as part of our culture here at Nationwide Children’s. In the case of getting telehealth up and running, it couldn’t have been truer,” says Libbey Hoang, vice president of Planning and Business Development at Nationwide Children’s. “Experts in technology, EPIC and MyChart, along with
