UVA School of Medicine

Spring 2020 3 following the declaration of the public health emergency, our providers enabled more than 1,500 patient visits daily with two-way video technologies or telephone services. Within our hospital, we have configured more than 80 isolation rooms with the iSOCOMS carts. This has enabled our own clinicians to provide consultations from locations other than from directly within the special pathogens unit or patient isolation rooms. Soon we will launch a new direct- to-consumer urgent care portal to our emergency physicians. We have greatly expanded our remote patient monitoring programs, not just for high risk patients with chronic illness, but also for our COVID-19 positive patients, who, if symptomatic are monitored by our nurse practitioners every four hours using videoconferencing and biometric devices. All RPM patient data are integrated into our EMR. In some cases, we are also monitoring patients with multifunction remote examination tools. We have greatly expanded our external facing relationships with post-acute and long-term care facilities, where a significant number of outbreaks in Virginia have occurred. As an example, following a request from a long-term care facility with more than 90% of patients testing positive, we delivered a telemedicine cart and rapidly executed an agreement that same day, to enable our clinicians to make daily rounds and provide consultations. Our Project Core ambulatory eConsult program has also been ramped up to provide inpatient eConsults, and we have implemented a COVID-19 Project ECHO statewide program. These transformations required an all-hands on-deck approach supported at the top by UVA senior leadership and by our clinicians, working in partnership with UVA telemedicine, health IT, our billing and compliance teams, patient registration staff, contracting, our analytics group, and of course, our patients. Training and augmented communications are an essential component of this transformation, and we have scaled our training programs across the learning continuum to include our undergraduate and graduate medical education stakeholders. UVA CME offers on-line training, through our portal, Telehealth Village, which has been offered to all UVA Health constituencies. It is our hope that the digital health reforms and investments rapidly scaled in response to this public health emergency will endure. With what likely will be a cyclic nature of COVID-19, or in preparation for any future public health emergency, healthcare providers and systems must be ready. Andrew M. Southerland, MD, Res '11, conducts a telemedicine consultation. "It is our hope that the digital health reforms and investments rapidly scaled in response to this public health emergency will endure."

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