86H - Virtual Care Innovation to Support Inclusive and Equitable Care Delivery

Wednesday, March 22

10:45–11:45 a.m.

Healthcare organizations and leaders are increasingly focused on leveraging digital technologies to create an accessible, convenient omnichannel customer experience. However, socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors pose barriers that may affect telehealth utilization. Examples include digital access, digital literacy, health literacy and language barriers. This session will describe best practices and lessons learned by a pediatric virtual care program in improving health equity and mitigating barriers to digital healthcare.

The program completed over 70,000 virtual visits from 2020 to May 2022, and 57.6% of patients were seen within seven days for telehealth physician visits, compared to 43.2% for in-person care. In addition, a distance traveled tool showed over 1,257,535 total miles saved, total savings of $397,472 and total time saved of 47,755 hours, for the patient and family.

The session will highlight the development and deployment of a virtual care roadmap for telehealth advances and present efficient digital clinical workflows. Attendees will learn strategies to streamline the digital journey and simplify the user experience, such as improving integration with the EMR, enabling multiple languages in the application, and integrating third-party interpreters in workflows. Also discussed will be how to align a virtual care program with hospitalwide diversity, equity and inclusion and strategic initiatives and approaches to engage patients and families in advancing virtual care, support data-driven organization and initiatives, and foster successful community partnerships to reduce healthcare gaps, including improving access to specialists and reducing travel costs.

Learning Objectives

• Recognize the impact of socioeconomic/sociodemographic factors on telehealth adoption, access and continuity of care.
• Identify best practices for expansion of virtual healthcare services in a way that promotes health equity.