Deregulation, Telemedicine, Telehealth

At a recent White House event, Telehealth was highlighted as an increasing trend due to COVID-19, and the need for health professionals and patients to maintain social distancing. Recent deregulation has made Telehealth more accessible across the United States. BodiMetrics partners with CareSpan in this regard for:

Patient Integration
Enabling active, meaningful participation in wellness planning and medical treatment decisions that optimize outcomes

Provider Integration
Collaborating as multi-disciplinary medical teams that include patient participation to generate the best outcomes

Workflow Integration
Remote monitoring, tele-health, clinical encounters, dynamic documentation and clinical decision support

Data Integration
Predictive analytics to prevent crises; outcome analytics for continuous health improvement while reducing costs

#telehealth #telemedicine

Excerpt from White House transcript follows:

“Dr. Amy Johnson is a nurse practitioner in rural Virginia. Amy, please come up and share with us how important expanded healthcare and telehealth has been for you and your patients. Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

DR. JOHNSON: Thank you, Mr. President. Good afternoon. My name is Dr. Amy Johnson and I’m from Bedford, Virginia. Telehealth deregulation has been of substantial benefit to my colleagues and I over recent months during the COVID-19 crisis. Prior to COVID restrictions, our small local hospital that had limited access to specialty services used telehealth for neurological, mental health, and palliative care consults. However, telehealth was not something that was used within our primary-care setting.

Since the deregulation of telehealth restrictions and expansion of guidelines through CMS, we’ve had the opportunity to integrate video and audio visits as part of our patient care experience. During the COVID crisis, there were days when almost all of my visits were done via telehealth. This allowed me to continue to care for my patients, including those that were the most vulnerable, without risking exposure to illness by bringing them into the office setting.

Since we’ve gone back to a more traditional model, we’ve continued to offer telehealth visits, which are a valuable option for home, health, and hospice patients; patients with limited mobility; and patients that remain at high risk.

As a farm safety specialist, I can see the use of telehealth expanding to offer more services to our farming population and rural Americans, including much-needed mental health services, which are unfortunately very sparse.

In addition, access to primary care and to specialty services can be improved in medically underserved areas with deregulation and the use of telehealth services by healthcare providers, increasing the use of preventative healthcare modalities, allowing for more intensive management of patients with chronic diseases and decreasing healthcare disparities.

Thank you, Mr. President. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. Great job. Thank you. So that’s been a great help to you, telehealth. It’s been an incredible — it’s been an incredible thing. Great job. Thank you very much.”

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