Enterprise Virtual Health: from Many Telemedicine Projects to One Program

April 14, 2019 | 3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. CDT

NYU Langone Health leadership established a strategic goal of developing a high-growth Virtual Health program to enhance the patient experience, reduce expenses, and improve operational efficiency. With this direction, we morphed from multiple telemedicine projects to a thoughtfully implemented Virtual Health Program.

The two most important factors were the scalability of the technology and that the solutions integrate seamlessly with the single instance Epic EHR. The Virtual Health Steering Board was created to govern the programmatic development. We engineered a scalable program by centralizing strategic decision-making within Health System IT, with the CMIO and the CTO acting as the programmatic business sponsors. We seamlessly integrated telemedicine workflows into the EHR and patient portal with our virtual urgent care. We expanded direct-to-consumer video visit services to more than 350 providers in specialties such as surgery (general, orthopedic, cardiothoracic, gynecologic), oncology, weight management, gastroenterology, cardiology, FQHC school-based services and more. We continue to expand these standard tools to other services.

A Virtual Health IT team was formed to facilitate the necessary focus to build a scalable program. This included a core team of the Virtual Health Director, 3 analysts, and a project manager, in addition to a multidisciplinary team of other application analysts. Solutions have also been architected for freestanding Emergency Departments. Telemedicine carts were placed in the EDs, and are leveraged by remote specialists for services such as telestroke and telepsychiatry to provide emergent treatment from their smartphone or tablet using our standard Cisco Jabber video infrastructure. We also deployed in-room tablets for providers to initiate on-the-fly telemedicine encounters with any patient in one of our 500+ inpatient rooms. We’ve completed 25+ projects since the program’s inception and have surpassed 6,000 outpatient video visits with monthly volume growth of 12x in 18 months. Our average patient satisfaction score is 4.7/5 stars.

Speakers:

• Jason Sherwin, MBA, Associate Director, Virtual Health, NYU Langone Health
• Paul Testa, MD, JD, MPH, Chief Medical Information Officer, NYU Langone Health