Page 57 - Innovation Delaware 2021

INNOVATION IN THE COVID AGE
BY ROGER MORRIS
REALIGNING HEALTH CARE’S
GROUND RULES
How Delaware’s health systems adjusted to meet patients’ needs in a pandemic
DAVID TAM started his tenure as president and CEO of Sussex County’s Beebe Healthcare in April 2020 — just as the COVID pandemic was hitting Delaware hard.
“I felt a little bit like I was parachuting into Normandy on D-Day,” the physician and former Navy officer says.
Unlike corporations, which could arrange for their white-collars employees to work from home, health systems needed their staff members to interact first-hand with their most endangered patients even as hospitals were being flooded with COVID patients.
In addition to these challenges, health systems faced another quandary: how could they provide medical care for existing patients who did not have COVID but nevertheless needed routine monitoring for their medical conditions? Or for those who were scheduled to have regular office visits with doctors and nurses who might have been exposed to the coronavirus?
As a result of these challenges, Tam and his fellow hospital administrators in Delaware report, they are much farther down the road to advanced telehealth services and telemedicine practices than they were when the pandemic hit last March.
“We were beginning to pivot toward remote care before the pandemic, and COVID just accelerated it,” says JONATHAN KAUFMANN, DO, chief medical information officer at Bayhealth. KEN SILVERSTEIN, MD, chief physician executive and executive vice president at ChristianaCare, agrees: “Our trajectory was accelerated, and it provided the opportunity for us to recreate health care delivery.”
Connecting with Patients Remotely
Nemours Children’s Health Care had already been utilizing its CareConnect platform for five years, working with providers and with parents to evaluate patient conditions and determine next steps. “But before the pandemic, we had 200 active providers
using virtual visits” for Nemours services, says CAREY OFFICER, vice president, service delivery innovation for Nemours. “Post- COVID, that went up to 800 physicians, nurse practitioners, psychologists and other providers.” Interestingly, she says, the traditionally low number of primary care calls mushroomed.
One of the biggest challenges, Officer says, was in training parents how to use the remote telehealth system. “But we had 87 of our Nemours associates volunteering to get on the phones and explain to parents how
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