6th National
Telehealth Summit

9:50am
Opening Remarks
Bret Larsen
CEO
eVisit

10:05am – 10:50am
Implementing a Successful Telehealth Program

Launching a telemedicine program can be a daunting task. In this session, you will learn the key foundational elements to building a successful telehealth program. Hear from experts on areas to assess when developing a telehealth program, implementation strategies, and receive answers to questions that commonly arise throughout the various stages of program development. Topics to be discussed will include:

• Key elements required for a telehealth program
• Finding a model that works best for clinical and business objectives
• Evaluating whether to buy or build by modeling the financial impact and ROI of each option in both the near and the long-term
• How telehealth can be applied across the care continuum
• Key clinical, operational and technical factors important in the development and implementation
• A framework for modeling and analyzing the ROI
• Critical factors to scale and sustain your telehealth program

Sirene Garcia
Chief Innovation Officer
Finger Lakes Community Health

10:55am – 11:40am
Remote Patient Monitoring:  Bridging Outpatient and Inpatient Care to Reduce Healthcare Utilization

Remote patient monitoring has its roots in large adult patient populations and focused specifically on reducing readmissions within 90 days. These are key metrics, but when applied in a pediatric populations utilization and metrics may need to be broader to capture the promise of the technology. In this talk we will outline one organization’s experience over 4+ years with remote monitoring in pediatrics. We will provide lessons learned from implementation, discussion on staffing models, enrollment practices, and data on outcomes including experience and utilization. Remote monitoring truly has the promise to bridge the outpatient and inpatient care settings, and we will discuss pilot projects underway to evaluate this further.

Jennifer Ruschman, ScM
Senior Director, Center for Telehealth
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

11:45am – 12:30pm
Implementation of Virtual Urgent Care Across an Entire Health System at Advocate Aurora Health

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed Advocate Aurora Health’s (AAH) employment of tele-critical care and allowed us to exercise its adaptability to address new needs as they arise. Any high reliability organization needs to be able to mitigate external risks such as political, economic or geographic risks. As the COVID-19 pandemic threatened to overwhelm our hospitals, AAH seized the opportunity to leverage their 17 years of experience in delivering remote tele-critical care. By deploying mobile carts and adjusting workflows and criteria, AAH was able to deliver ICU level monitoring to patients in many alternative care settings. The speakers will discuss how they employed the tactics of a high reliability organization to deploy critical care monitoring to unlikely hospital ICU locations and then leveraged the technology in other care scenarios.

Michael Ries, MD, MBA, FCCM, FCCP, FACP
Medical Director, System Critical Care, Tele-Critical Care, Patient Command Center, and Advocate Intensivist Partners
Advocate Aurora Health

 Cindy Welsh, RN, MBA, FACHE
Vice President System Adult Critical Care, TeleICU, VPMS, Advocate Intensivist Partners, Central Telemetry-IL
Advocate Aurora Health

12:30pm
Lunch/Networking Break

1:00pm – 2:05pm
Panel: How Telehealth Can Help Reduce Hospital Readmissions

When it comes to reducing readmission rates, setting patients up for success is critical. Post-discharge, telehealth can help. Advances in digital technology have enabled providers to offer more effective videoconferencing and information-sharing capabilities. The potential post-discharge benefits are significant. This panel will examine ways that telehealth can help reduce hospital readmissions. Topics to be discussed will include:

• Doctor-patient communication
• Improved self-care
• Sharing educational content
• Making patients comfortable

Panelists:

Elise Gentile, MS, APRN, CPNP
Pediatric Nurse Practitioner, Pediatric Complex Care Program
Advocate Children’s Hospital 

Kerry Palakanis, DNP, APRN
Executive Director Connect Care Operations
Intermountain Healthcare 

Evelyn Terrell, OTD, MHSA
Director of Telehealth and Special Projects
Nicklaus Children’s Health System

2:10pm – 2:55pm
Paying for Value in Telehealth

COVID-19 has transformed the way health care is delivered, and consequently the policies that govern care delivery. Telehealth reimbursement and other regulatory flexibilities enabled providers to quickly pivot operations for COVID-19, but temporary policies also poised the health policy landscape for significant change after the pandemic, particularly for Medicare coverage. This session will examine the future of payments and value in telehealth.

Ceci Connolly
President and Chief Executive Officer
Alliance of Community Health Plans

3:00pm – 3:45pm
Telehealth and Patient Safety

Telehealth can be an effective way of limiting patient exposure to individuals who have contracted COVID-19. One approach is to use telehealth in place of traditional in-person visits for care unrelated to COVID-19 that cannot be postponed. This allows patients to receive care from the safety of their homes and avoid exposure to the virus during transit or at in-person appointments. Another approach is to use telehealth as a means of performing an initial evaluation and triage of patients with COVID-19 symptoms. Such virtual triage processes can protect other patients by directing potentially infected individuals to the most appropriate location to seek care or testing and keep them out of primary care waiting rooms. This session will examine the optimal use of telehealth to delivery safe patient care.

Sherene Schlegel, RN
Executive Director, Telehealth Clinical Operations
Providence St. Joseph Health

3:50pm – 4:35pm
Reducing Disparities in Care by Creating an Equitable Telehealth Program

Telehealth has the potential to reduce barriers to accessing care with the result of eliminating disparities in health outcomes related to socioeconomic status. Unfortunately, technology as well as cultural and language considerations for specific patient groups may widen, rather than, reduce access to care. A telehealth program that avoids perpetuating health disparities requires a platform that is accessible to all patients and incorporates a continuous process improvement. This presentation will provide general guidelines for developing a telehealth program that promotes health equity.

Anthony Magit, MD, MPH
Clinical Professor of Surgery, UC San Diego School of Medicine
Chief Integration Officer
Rady Children’s Hospital

4:40pm – 5:25pm
Training the Next Generation Workforce for Telehealth

This talk will focus on the important components of implementing a telemedicine program enterprise wide with specific focus on training of clinicians and staff to deliver high quality care via telemedicine, regardless of the specialty.

Judd E. Hollander, MD
Senior Vice President for Healthcare Delivery Innovation, TJU
Associate Dean for Strategic Health Initiatives, Sidney Kimmel Medical College
Vice Chair for Finance and Healthcare Enterprises
Department of Emergency Medicine
Thomas Jefferson University

5:30pm
End of Day One

9:50am
Recap of Day One

10:05am – 10:50am
The Role of Telehealth in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Concerns about the prevention and management of COVID-19 are on the rise, as it is crucial that travel and transfer of the patients be minimal for diagnosis, treatment and follow-ups. Telehealth can play an important role. In this session healthcare providers will learn how they can better control the rapid spread of COVID-19 and improve the efficiency of their hospital and/or health system by replacing a proportion of face-to-face clinical encounters with telehealth.

Todd J. Vento, MD, MPH, FACP, FIDSA
Medical Director, ID TeleHealth
Associate Medical Director, Intermountain Connect
Intermountain Healthcare 

10:55am – 11:40am
Best Practices for Patient Engagement and Satisfaction with Telehealth

The rise of healthcare consumerism has made patient engagement more important to hospitals and health systems. Telehealth has allowed these organizations to develop new ways to provide patients better access to care while helping empower them to stay healthier longer. Telehealth brings doctors to the patient in new ways by delivering care to patients in remote or rural settings, and by increasing access to medical treatment anywhere and at any time. This session will examine practical steps that healthcare providers can take to increase patient engagement.

Sue Voltz
Administrator, Telehealth Program
Center for Health Delivery Innovation
Nemours Children’s Health System

11:45am – 12:30pm
Strategic Approaches to Evaluate Telehealth

Measuring the value of telehealth programs is critical to understanding when and for whom to use such technology tools during healthcare delivery to improve health outcomes. We propose an evaluation toolkit (STEM) that incorporate concepts and measures described in published telehealth measurement frameworks and QI methodology. Using the toolkit, participants will 1) Understand key characteristics of current telehealth measurement frameworks, 2) Apply the STEM (SPROUT Telehealth Evaluation and Measurement) Tool to measure impact of telehealth om health outcomes, the quality and cost of healthcare delivery, individual experience, and key performance indicators, and 3) Know how to use STEM within a quality improvement project.

John Chuo, MD, MS
National Quality Officer
Clinical Lead for Digital Health Evaluation
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia 

12:30pm – 1:00pm
Lunch Break 

1:05pm – 1:50pm
Expanding Access to Healthcare with Telehealth

As healthcare spending continues to increase, policymakers look for ways to ensure access to care in a cost-effective manner that improves health for their constituents. Enhancing and increasing access to healthcare services through telehealth is widely viewed as one strategy to help address workforce shortages and reach patients in rural and underserved areas. This session will examine how by improving access to lower-cost primary and specialty care, telehealth can provide timely, accessible care in lower-cost environments and help reduce expensive emergency room visits.

Peter A. Rasmussen, MD
Chief Clinical Officer
Cleveland Clinic

1:55pm – 2:40pm
Lessons from the Field: Coordinating Care Using Telehealth in a Pragmatic Randomized Trial of Stroke Care

As the 5^th leading cause of death and a leading cause of long-term disability in the United States, stroke is complex and involves multiple mechanisms and high risk and cost. Even when initial acute events are managed successfully, patient risk remains high. Patients and caregivers often report lacking care coordination and poor communication across the stroke care continuum (from acute care to in-hospital care and post-discharge to immediate recovery/rehabilitation through long-term recovery), resulting in complications, rehospitalization, stroke recurrence, and poor risk factor management for patients and limited support and education for caregivers. C3FIT (Coordinated, Collaborative, Comprehensive, Family-based, Integrated, Technology-enabled Stroke Care; #PCS-2017-C3-9081; PI: KGaines) is a pragmatic, randomized trial that compares current Joint Commission-certified Comprehensive and Primary Stroke Center (CSC/PSC) care with a more coordinated, technology-enabled Integrated Stroke Practice Unit (ISPU) approach at 18 clinical sites across the United States. Inclusion/exclusion criteria broadly represent a stroke population of hospital-admitted stroke patients including ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke, and the target sample size is ~1800 patients (~100 per clinical site). Primary outcomes include patient function and quality of life, and secondary outcomes assess risk factor control, readmissions, recurrence, and time at home (at 3, 6, and 12 months) and durability of intervention (at 24 months). Study personnel will discuss specific aspects of this integrated model as they relate to care coordination, focusing specifically on the planned use of telehealth as part of this model and the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Patricia Commiskey, DrPH, MA
Research Associate Professor, Department of Neurology
Chief Research Scientist, C3FIT
Vanderbilt University Medical Center 

Jeri Braunlin, DNP, ACNS, BC, NEA, BC, CNRN, RN
Instructor, Neurology
Program Manager, C3FIT
Vanderbilt University Medical Center 

Kenneth Gaines, MD, MBA
Professor, Neurology
Medical Director, Vanderbilt Teleneurology
Vanderbilt University Medical Center

2:45pm – 3:30pm
Cardiology Telehealth Trial by Fire

The traditional healthcare delivery model for cardiovascular care required an essentially overnight reconstruction to a virtual based platform for our healthcare system.  COVID 19 placed providers, patients and our daily functions in an unfamiliar territory.  Telehealth is an entity that must remain in place for optimal patient care and outcomes once normalcy return.  This presentation will discuss the implementation, advantages and hurdles that outpatient Cardiology telemedicine encountered before, during and projections after the pandemic.

Dr. Marc Arnold DNP, ANP-BC
Doctor of Nursing Practice
Board Certified Adult Nurse Practitioner
Bon Secours Health Cardiology

3:30pm – 4:15pm
Leveraging Technology Across the Care Continuum: Supporting Inpatients and Outpatients Using Video Telemedicine and Remote Patient Monitoring for COVID-19

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Mayo Clinic rapidly scaled existing telehealth programs and developed new programs to support the outpatient and inpatient practices.  Within the inpatient setting, video visit and continuous monitoring solutions were leveraged to reduce the provider’s physical presence in the patient’s room.  This lowered the risk of transmitting COVID-19 from patient to the care team.  In the outpatient setting, two existing Remote Patient Monitoring solutions were leveraged to provide support for patients who tested positive for COVID-19.  The COVID-19 program provided both low-and high-intensity solutions in order to best fit patient and practice needs.  This session will detail how multidisciplinary teams successfully partnered with the managing care teams to leverage these solutions, taking an agile approach to implementation and continuous improvement.

Trevor Coons, MHA, FACHE
Operations Manager, Hospital Internal Medicine
Mayo Clinic 

Laura Christopherson, MBA
Operations Manager
Mayo Clinic Center for Connected Care

4:15pm
Conference Concludes