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This is Gracelyn Keller with the Becker's Healthcare
Podcast, and we are live at the 9th
annual health IT digital health and RCM conference.
I'm excited now to be joined by Jasmine
Bishop, who is the managing director at MedStar
Telehealth Innovation Center.
Jasmine, thanks for being here, and would love
to start off by having you introduce yourself
a little bit further.
Thanks for having me.
As you said, I'm the managing director for
our telehealth innovation center at MedStar Health. We're
a 10 hospital health system in the DC,
Maryland, and Virginia area, and we are also
benefited by a large innovation institute of which
I am part of. And we are
supporting,
up to 450,000
patient visits each year with some of our
telehealth, so I'm excited to talk to you
a little bit more about that today. But
as a quick background, I've been in telehealth
for 15 years. I started in California where
I'm originally from, and we started back then
with addressing the biggest barriers that we have
in telehealth, which is broadband. So we actually
were
installing,
broadband lines across the state of California.
And
since then, I've moved into the health system
space, and I'm excited to be able to
expand what it means
to provide telehealth care and move into some
more care innovation. So I'm excited to talk
more about that today. Great. Well, thank you
so much for being here. And I understand
your organization has had 3 years of historic
growth in this space. So can you expand
a little bit on how telehealth has matured
for you?
Definitely. So MedStar Health was well positioned when
the pandemic hit, and everyone had to shut
down most of their ambulatory operations in March
of 2020.
And well positioned because of us having a
MedStar Institute for Innovation and a telehealth innovation
center, which I now lead alongside my diet
partner, Doug Breith and Booker.
And we had already partnered with different platforms
to be able to provide telehealth services. We
just had to amp them up significantly.
So we have the same story that every
other health system had about historic growth in
that moment. What I'm really excited to talk
about is where we're going next and how
we've already started to see some of that
growth stabilize.
So we are now in a moment where
we have 15% of our ambulatory visits are
still being done over telehealth, at least in
primary care. Overall, about 8%,
and we get upwards of 30 to 40%
in our behavioral health space.
Year over year, we continue to see in
this past 2 fiscal years
450,000
visits per year, which suggests some stabilization.
So I'm excited for us to be able
to continue to build on that growth and
then, as I said, be able to move
beyond what is considered traditional telehealth.
And how has this evolution of telehealth enabled
care continually?
So the care continuity piece is important because
it describes how we can bring in technology
beyond just the point of care when a
patient, say, bumps their head in the middle
of the night and needs to call our
247 virtual urgent care platform, which we call
MedStar evisit.
We also are being able to bring this
technology into our urgent care centers. MedStar operates
over 30 urgent care centers across, Maryland, DC,
and Virginia,
And these urgent care centers are key to
part of our care continuity plan. We wanna
make sure that patients are going into the
right center of care for their acuity level.
Sometimes the patient doesn't always know, and that
is where we're able to bring in specialty
consultations into urgent care. So imagine if you
go into one of our urgent care centers
and you are not so sure if you
might need to go to an emergency
department,
we actually have bunkered ED Physicians that are
supporting the urgent cares through video based consultation
to help the urgent care providers make those
decisions at the site of care.
We also are able to
provide some confidence and comfort to what we
would call our worried well, those that are
fine to go home, but do have some
ailment that would be benefit
from connecting with a specialist. And so in
that moment, we can actually roll in a
video cart and have them do a teleconsult
either with the patient in the room or
just between the urgent care provider and their
specialist
to discuss the treatment plan when the patient
gets home and even to schedule at the
appointment.
That also helps with our patient's ability to
know who to reach out to, and we
can even schedule that appointment right when they're
there.
And as we discussed telehealth and with the
incredible growth that we've seen in that area
from
couple years ago all the way through now,
I would love to know how you see
that health care organizations can better support
both IT and clinical teams as we're carrying
out these innovations and delivering health in a
digital way? Yeah. It's such a great question.
We have a shiny toy problem.
It's, it's really fun to do the new
thing. It's just like any one of us
that have started a diet program as an
example. We do it for a couple weeks.
It feels good and because it's exciting and
new, and then it drops off. I think
the same thing can happen in not exactly
the same way, but with the same impact
when it comes to building out new innovation
in our health systems.
We will find ourselves with an impassioned clinical
champion that wants to do something important,
maybe even be lucky enough to have some
funding for it. And then, ultimately, once we
have that thing live, we move on to
the next without
continuing to build and nurture that original innovation.
So one of the ways that we can
support our IT organization is ensuring that when
we are considering a new innovation, we build
it in a way that has sustainability.
And sustainability isn't just ensuring that it has
a clinical champion that is going to stick
around. It's also about understanding the back end
support.
Cybersecurity is a big issue for everyone right
now, and we wanna make sure that we
have
product managers that are supporting these platforms that
we put in place, application support so the
users have someone to reach out to when
the product isn't working. And,
ultimately, when we are
going after financing for these new innovations,
keeping our IT colleagues in mind and ensuring
that we're building the support that they will
need to be providing us into that finance
request.
And finally, as we wrap our conversation, I'd
love to know what your top piece of
advice is for health care leaders
as we prepare for further advancements in technology
and greater
demands for care.
Sure.
So I would say partner boldly,
and I mean that internally and externally. So
we are familiar with the traditional lines of
value,
cost savings, revenue generation.
We know that we can go to our
finance teams and show them where those are
hitting in ROI through a nicely
built business case. But there's a lot more
value that can be gained through patient and
provider experience
that doesn't have to always be seen as
soft value. There are ways to define that
that actually make a difference for our system
to ensure that the very slim margins that
nonprofit health systems work within, we're able to
make those margins work for us and for
our patients and ensure that we're still
funding innovation for the next generation.
The other element that I would share is
on the external side. So we like to
partner with all size of vendor,
and sometimes they're startups, and that requires us
to put together a bit of a vendor
stack to support whatever the initiative is. Maybe
that vendor is really good in one space,
but we need to round them out with
1 or 2 other vendors. Sometimes those other
vendors might be competitors to the original one,
and we want to encourage them to partner
boldly too. See beyond those traditional
competition lines so that they can partner in
a way that
allows for true codevelopment
and building out real innovation.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for taking
the time to join me today, Jasmine, on
the Becker's Healthcare podcast. Again, we are live
at the 9th annual health IT digital health
and RCM conference. Thanks so much, Grace.