The American Telemedicine Association has gathered a number of speakers to share their expertise on integrating virtual care into healthcare delivery.

WHY IT MATTERS

ATA is taking the week to encourage telehealth solution providers, hospital systems and medical practices, patient advocacy leaders, policymakers and other stakeholders to examine hybrid care models that include in-person and virtual care.

The Telehealth Awareness Week educational series aims to share new resources and elevate the voices of patients and healthcare professionals who depend on telehealth to receive and deliver care. 

Each session has multiple speakers, including doctors and nurses, C-suite executives, operational directors, academics and others. 

The virtual series that began Monday continues today with discussions on aging, home testing use cases and reimbursement, and increasing equity in mental healthcare access.

On Wednesday, sessions address patient care, policy, big telemedicine experiences, recruiting and retaining diverse patients for clinical trials by leveraging the internet of things with telehealth and how to reach patients with limited WiFi access.

The series concludes Thursday with conversations on asynchronous telehealth, how digital healthcare transformation affects patient access and remote monitoring.

Register for each event individually. 

ATA has also compiled resources contributed by organizations dedicated to supporting broader access to telehealth and is featuring guest bloggers to address learnings in virtual care model development.

THE LARGER TREND

Telehealth not only facilitates patient access to care, but can also help alleviate the burnout experienced across the healthcare profession.

The fast rise of telehealth during the pandemic resulted in new technology deployments, but what has not kept pace are strategies to address burnout caused by telehealth triggers, according to Marlene McDermott, vice president of therapy services at Array Behavioral Care.

"Telemedicine gives us the opportunity to reimagine how we leverage this finite number of resources to the fullest potential, while also acknowledging that to keep the number of existing providers, we have to keep them happy and mentally healthy," she told Healthcare IT News in August.

Virtual care can help address the access issues caused by physician shortage with education and resources that help cultivate intentionality with both patients and the clinicians that use the tools.  

ON THE RECORD

"Virtual care is no longer simply the use of telehealth. It must be an all-encompassing strategy that includes traditional virtual visits, but also acknowledges the importance of a deep strategy surrounding virtual rounding and telesitting, virtual patient monitoring and hospital at home and team & community collaboration," said Raj Toleti, CEO of Andor Health, in an ATA Telehealth Awareness Week blog post.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.