By Sara Heath
- It’s hard to listen to the radio without hearing an ad from the local hospital to get your preventive screenings done. This push, fueled in part by delayed care during the COVID-19 pandemic, signals a new challenge for healthcare as it stares down what could amount to serious care gaps.
But according to experts from Providence, there’s not a lot new about this. There could be a big gulf in patients who did and did not receive key preventive screenings, to be certain, but healthcare organizations like Providence can lean on the patient outreach strategies and relationships that have always supported them.
“There are so many things coming out of this pandemic that we are still orienting to and trying to understand what the repercussions of downstream effects are going to be,” David Kim, MD, chief executive of physician enterprise at Providence, told PatientEngagementHIT. “We know that for at the very least, we have two- or three-month runs early on and then during some of the surges where patients weren't coming in for in-person visits.”
The data backs that up. In February 2021, dual analyses from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute found that a third of adults missed an appointment during the first half of the pandemic, mostly out of concern of getting infected during that care encounter.
Many healthcare organizations, Providence included, leaned on telehealth to help promote chronic disease management and deployed patient outreach campaigns to get patients safely back into the office. Nevertheless, there are still some unknowns about people who slipped through the cracks.
READ MORE: Using Risk Stratification in Patient Engagement Strategies
“It's still a little bit of that remains to be seen what the repercussions of that is,” Kim explained.
The good news, said Kim and his colleague, Michelle Best, executive director of quality improvement at Providence, is that Providence already has the tools in place to make sure it can both identify and address gaps in care. According to Best, the healthcare organization needs to make sure it deploys those tools with the right populations.
“So many people are just afraid to even go to the hospital that it seemed like there were a lot of instances that happened when, once they went to the hospital, they were in much more critical condition,” Best said, noting that patients who delayed care tended to see their wellness deteriorate.
“Normally, before COVID, they would've gone in a lot earlier,” she continued. “Our focus is on the patients really who are higher risk patients and really trying to reach out and make them feel safe to come back in.”
Generally speaking, Providence is focusing on its chronic care and older populations, looking to determine who may have missed care or preventive screening. Kim said the organization is using its data analytics tools it had deployed even before the pandemic to flag the highest-risk patients.
READ MORE: 4 Patient Engagement Strategies to Close Patient Care Gaps
“We can identify who our highest, most vulnerable risk patients are,” Kim said. “That continued throughout COVID. Then we have care management support that proactively reaches out to these patients to make sure that they're getting the care they need. So they don't decompensate or get sick enough to wind up having to go to the emergency room.”
That care management team had to double down during the pandemic, too, Kim said, and is being deployed heavily to manage chronic disease prevention.
And from there it’s a patient outreach balancing act, Kim conceded, but one that Providence is accustomed to. Providence is a large health system with a lot of resources, allowing it to be both big and small in its outreach, Kim said. That helps it control its broad marketing campaigns and personalized patient outreach.
“We make sure that we're coordinated with our internal partners,” Kim advised. “Whether it's on the hospital side, on the population health side, on the medical group side, to make sure that we are aligned in our communication strategy so that Providence is showing up in a familiar, comfortable way for patients to be able to understand and respond to.”
“Then number two, it's trying to find that balance of maintaining the individual relationship with the patient and then maintaining your relationship with the community,” he continued. “Which are overlapping, but not always the same thing. So how do we get the word out to the community to build confidence, reassure and help them understand what steps we're taking to keep our environment safe a ton and approachable?”
READ MORE: Mobile Health Clinics Traverse COVID-19’s Access to Care Gaps
Providence has done some community-level marketing to advertise its services and compel patients to come in for important preventive screenings. But more than anything, the health system knows healthcare has to be personal, so it has leveraged the deep relationships it has with patients.
Providence built out those relationships throughout the pandemic, dating all the way back to when it couldn’t host in-person wellness checks, Best said. Because of those low patient volumes, staff had the time to make personal calls to patients checking in and alert them when clinics reopened in the spring.
“Our patients we're so grateful just to have a phone call, ‘hey we're just calling to see how you're doing, making sure you're okay. We want to let you know that it's safe to come in if you need an appointment,’” she recalled. “We focused in on them and made multiple calls to some of them throughout the year to make sure that if we hadn't seen them to try to get them in.”
“That's the focus this year too,” Best added. “Who are those patients that still did not come in last year that we didn't speak?”
Those patients are going to get a different message from last year, at least in part, Best said. While last year the health system emphasized how safe and clean the clinics were, this spring it will underscore just how important preventive care is. It could be more dangerous to put off a recommended mammogram than to receive in-person care during a pandemic.
Providence is being innovative in how it delivers that needed care, Best added. For example, during its flu clinics it also checked patients for any care gaps and closed those gaps right on the spot. And with the help of Providence’s pharmacist partners, patients with diabetes are getting regular checks to ensure certain clinical metrics were still in control.
“We started doing these diabetes one-stop-shops for these patients that hadn't been in, either didn't have a test at all or still were not controlled,” she reported. “We were trying to create just a one-stop-shop where they come in and they get all their diabetic testing to try to encourage them to come in instead of having to come in multiple times for different tests.”
These systems have been effective because they leaned on the strategies that Providence already knew, the pair agreed. And perhaps most importantly, they also leaned on the relationships that have so strongly defined Providence as an institution.
“There is this general sense that healthcare at some level can be commoditized these days. That it's about a transaction. One of the things I'm most proud of Providence and of our physicians and providers and caregivers over this time is relationship makes such a difference,” Kim said.
“Getting a phone call from a doctor that you know, who cares for you and a nurse who cares for you, create a certain level of confidence and safety that maybe it's okay for you to go in,” he added. “Even though I'm scared, I'm going to go, because I know that they care for me. That relationship made, I think, a huge difference in people having confidence coming back to get the care that they maybe were putting off or had to come and get.”
Best and her team deployed key patient engagement tactics, but ultimately they were bolstered by the relationships that all of Providence was able to cultivate.
“It was so encouraging to me that it still matters, and that it gets to the heart of what people are really looking for in their relationship with a physician and with the healthcare system,” Kim concluded.
"care" - Google News
April 19, 2021 at 08:30PM
https://ift.tt/2QiNEqO
How Providence Prepared to Address COVID-19 Care Gaps - PatientEngagementHIT.com
"care" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2N6arSB
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "How Providence Prepared to Address COVID-19 Care Gaps - PatientEngagementHIT.com"
Post a Comment