Southwest Community Health Center integrates RPM, virtual care
Effective communication and engaging clinician champions were crucial success factors in gaining clinician support and achieving benefits.
Southwest Community Health Center in Bridgeport, Conn., recently launched a virtual care management program with assistance from its vendor partner, TimeDoc Health.
This program, in combination with the health center’s remote patient management (RPM) services, is creating a new form of team-based patient care.
A presentation in the HDM KLASroom highlights the importance of clinical champions and effective communications in an effective chronic care management program, said Dara Richards, MD, chief medical officer for SCHC; Richard Albrecht, executive director for the telehealth network at Community Health Network of Connecticut; Paul Helmuth, MD, medical director at TimeDoc Health; and Sarah Cameron, vice president of care management at TimeDoc Health.
Pre-planning is a key
“We can't jump right into any project without proper planning and bringing the right people to the table,” said Richards in describing SCHC’s early planning and ongoing coordination with stakeholders. “Within our organization, that means involving a clinical champion, as well as other extended members of the care team who will be supporting the patient. We then have meetings with our vendor partners.”
The clinical champion plays an important role in executing a technology-enabled service, Albrecht added. “Dr. Richards is that leader for SCHC, and she does an amazing job in the key area, which is communication across the team. Being able to share the stories of success actually drives providers across the organization to get engaged and to really embrace something new.”
TimeDoc Health understands the importance of team communication and a vendor partner’s role in it.
“It's really important that we have open lines of communication and that we communicate in ways that are effective for the providers,” Cameron said. “As a service organization coming into a practice, our goal is not to create entirely new workflows or communication paths. Our goal is to fit ourselves into the existing workflows and communication paths at the practice so that the providers and ancillary support staff are easily able to engage with our team in a way that's meaningful, effective and not a heavy lift for them.”
Data excites the providers
Providers also tend to get excited when they get to see the data from the organization’s remote monitoring tools, Richards said. But Helmuth noted that physicians need that data delivered in the right way that’s most useful to them.
“We’re trying to figure out the right way to present the data to the to the practice and to the providers so that the patients get the best possible outcomes and we don’t overwhelm the practices with the incoming flow of data,” Helmuth said. “We want to fit into the providers’ workflows, but we also need to acknowledge that we're asking providers to change some things in order to really keep moving forward in the way we transform healthcare.”
Taking a new approach to patient care is certainly a daunting task for healthcare organizations and individual healthcare providers. But SCHC is already seeing an impact on patients, so they are anxious to continue their efforts. Richards concluded her comments with her hopes and advice for those organizations that want to improve their chronic care management programs.
“If we want to make a difference in patients’ lives, we need to use the tools that we have — and the information that we have — to empower patients to take charge of their health. We’ve got to empower our providers and our clinical staff and make sure our care team has the information they need to care for their patients. And then we need our virtual care management services to help tie it all together.”
See the full list of Clinician Experience learning sessions from the HDM KLASroom Series