NIH Adopts Tech for Seamless Telehealth Capability
In the early days of the pandemic, the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health began using a telehealth platform that runs on top of commercially available solutions such as Microsoft Teams, while also streamlining integration with other tech systems and offering one-button simplicity for users.
“One of the greatest features is that it’s a fully integrated platform,” says Tricia Coffey, chief health information officer for the NIH Clinical Center. “We have the ability to support not only virtual visits but also virtual rounding, where teams can round on patients even if the entire team isn’t here onsite. It also manages telehealth appointments, so we don’t have to set up multiple feeds to other systems.”
Before the organization adopted the solution, patients had to download a video conferencing solution to their own device to participate in telehealth appointments, notes Marisa Owens, assistant chief for patient engagement and system integration.
“The solution uses the default browser on the user’s device, which was huge for us,” she says. “We have a wide variety of ages in our patient population, so it’s nice that people can just click on a link and it brings up their visit.”
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The clinical center averages around 50 telehealth visits a day, with the NIH’s National Cancer Institute and the National Institute on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse being the largest users. Owens says that telehealth is especially useful for follow-up appointments; the Clinical Center draws patients from around the country, and even for locals, traffic can make in-person follow-ups inconvenient.
The initial learning curve for telehealth solutions has “leveled off,” Coffey says, and clinicians are now exploring ways to further expand use of the technology.
“We’re thinking about how we can leverage telehealth to do more remote screening of patients for our studies so they’re not having to travel long distances just for their initial screening visit,” she says.
Owens predicts that the organization will soon incorporate other technologies, such as wearable devices, into its telehealth programs.
“We definitely are headed in that direction,” she says. “A lot of our research is dependent on patient information like blood pressure, temperature and other data that could be collected from a patient at home.”