Integrating Telehealth into the Clinical Setting during COVID-19

It’s hard to imagine, but if you needed to visit a doctor via telehealth two months ago, Medicare would not have covered it.¹

Today, because of COVID-19, Medicare now welcomes telehealth as an important clinical tool.² More importantly, with tele-everything having become the norm for work, play, and our social lives, patients and clinicians have quickly become comfortable with virtual medical visits.

In this new normal, the benefits of telehealth are being realized in real time. The days of only being able to meet with your provider if you traveled to their office are quickly becoming outdated. The technology has always been available, but now that the provider can be fully reimbursed when care is administered virtually, patients and providers are connecting more efficiently and reducing the risk of infectious diseases.

Providers and their clinical staff need the comfort and confidence that the telehealth process integrates seamlessly into their traditional protocols, practices and workflows. Enovate® Medical has a long history of integrating technology into multiple clinical specialties, especially in acute care hospitals. Combining Enovate’s telehealth partners’ software platform that’s designed to integrate into the hospital’s existing electronic health record (EHR) makes it a perfect turnkey solution.

In the time of COVID-19, many hospitals implemented the practice of forward triage, allowing patients to be screened before they showed up at the emergency room. Telehealth applications allowed forward triage to become a reality and proved effective at protecting patients, clinicians, and the community from exposure.

Respiratory symptoms have been the most commonly evaluated condition with this approach. And, with large numbers of patients in over-burdened ICUs (and with high numbers of clinicians out sick), telemedicine allows nurses and physicians to remotely monitor the status of 60 to 100 patients in ICUs in multiple hospitals.³

Whether in tents for drive through testing or the ICU where providers can quickly log in rather than consuming valuable time and PPE to walk into the ICU, the flexibility and mobility of the teleconferencing equipment prove indispensable as organizations rush to respond. Enovate’s expertise in mobility and mobile power solutions paired with our partners’ ability to integrate into the patient record of the existing EHR allows hospitals to transition into telehealth workflows faster and more effectively.

Now in multiple medical specialties, nurses can roll a cordless workstation like the Envoy to the bedside or into the exam room, cue up a real-time telehealth doctor visit, and capture the patient’s EHR medical data – all on a single mobile platform.

To learn more about the turnkey telehealth solutions from Enovate Medical, visit our Telehealth Solutions.

1. The patient had to live in a rural area and travel to a local medical facility to get telehealth services from a remote doctor. You could not talk to the doctor in your home.
2. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, “Medicare Telemedicine Health Care Provider Fact Sheet,” March 17, 2020
3. N Engl J Med 2020; 382:1679-1681 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2003539