This Q&A resulted from a conversation PSQH had with Nancy Riffel, MSA, BSN, RN, the patient services manager for Covenant HealthCare, a 643-bed hospital in Saginaw, Michigan, that is the largest healthcare provider in the Great Lakes Bay Region.

With healthcare workers and their loved ones at risk, provider organizations are looking for ways to leverage technology to keep their workers healthy while continuing to deliver essential healthcare services in their communities. Increasingly, they are looking in a familiar place—remote patient monitoring—but with a twist. Now, in some cases, those patients are also employees.

During the pandemic, the spotlight has turned to telehealth and its power to deliver healthcare while maintaining social distancing. But as the World Health Organization warns of a second peak of coronavirus cases in the United States and a second wave of COVID-19 later this year, healthcare leaders must consider: How do we apply the rear-view mirror lessons from the first wave of the pandemic to our virtual response to consumers’ healthcare needs during the second wave?

In this discussion, Doug Cusick, CEO of TransformativeMed, talks about why it has taken EHRs so long to roll out their technology virtually and why it took a pandemic to make EHRs—and health systems that use them—more accessible and easier to use.

Now that patients are becoming more accustomed to seeking care this way, healthcare organizations are expecting telehealth will continue to grow. Frost & Sullivan researchers are projecting a sevenfold growth in telehealth usage by 2025, for a five-year compound annual growth rate of 38.2%.