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MedCity News | Virtual Care Capability Needs to be Scaled Like the National Guard

The World Medical Innovation Forum hosted by Partners HealthCare on May 11 2020 included the session ‘Digital Health Becomes a Pillar’ in which Dr. Lee Schwamm, vice president of virtual care/digital health at Mass General Brigham, discussed some of the virtual care technology assumptions that have not held up in the COVID-19 crisis. AristaMD CEO, Brooke LeVasseur, highlights the focus healthcare must place on sustaining the digital health innovations supporting our providers during the pandemic.

Featured in MedCity News, May 2020

The Covid-19 crisis has catapulted telemedicine and virtual care to the fore. The urgency of this all-consuming public health emergency has led doubters — both on the consumer and provider side — to shed old assumptions, and almost overnight, adopt tools to receive and deliver care remotely.

The numbers tell the story – where some hospitals were doing a couple of thousand video visits a month pre-Covid-19, now they are doing a couple hundred thousand. But perhaps the framework for understanding the monumental transformation still looming for the medical establishment was crystallized during a virtual event Monday — World Medical Innovation Forum hosted Monday by Partners HealthCare, the Boston-based non-profit hospital and physician network that includes Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital. The event is held annually in Boston but was shifted to a virtual format given Covid-prompted limitations.

Without a financial engine powering the establishment of digital health into the medical ecosystem,  the gains made technologically during Covid-19 cannot be sustained.

In the session broadly titled, Digital Health Becomes a Pillar, Dr. Lee Schwamm, vice president of virtual care/digital health at Mass General Brigham, was talking about some of the assumptions that have not held up in the crisis — for example, that old people would not adopt video visits and weren’t adept with technology or that people who don’t speak English could not be properly taken care. He went on to add:

“I think what we have to recognize is that we were caught unprepared. As a medical system, we know that huge numbers of patients have deferred important medical care during this crisis because they are afraid to go to the hospital or their doctors are simply not available,” said Schwamm, who is also director of the Center for Telehealth and vice chair of neurology at Mass General Hospital. “We need to build this video capability, this virtual care infrastructure. We need this to be a permanent part of our health system going forward. This is the equivalent to the National Guard or the Army Reserve. We need to be able to deploy capacity at scale on very short notice for the foreseeable future because we don’t know what the shape of this pandemic is going to be like and we can’t afford to curtail our care.”

Think about what that means.

Just as for national defense and natural disasters, the National Guard is ready and available to swing into action, digital health has a similar level of import to the homeland in a medical crisis. That’s a far cry from digital health’s recent history of entrepreneurs going door to door to hospital tech committees and institutional review boards pleading for a pilot (often unpaid) to prove their technology’s value.