SR Health Blog

The rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine is accelerating across the country with 75.2 million doses distributed to the states and 64.1 million doses administered to patients, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

For today’s patients, texting is their preferred method to connect with their healthcare providers. Check out SR Health’s new video on how two-way text messaging can take patient communications and engagement to the next level. We’d love to get your feedback. Watch the video and share your thoughts in the comments section below. Your input will help us continue to refine our solutions to meet your demands.

Though a host of challenges remain, there’s much cause for optimism as the global fight against COVID-19 intensifies and vaccine rollout efforts accelerate in February 2021.

Increasingly, healthcare organizations are having to take cues from non-traditional care sources in order to stay one step ahead of the competition. Patient demand for greater convenience and the entry of more diverse competition catering to those needs is challenging primary care physicians to innovate and improve.

Cindy Williams, vice president and chief pharmacy officer at Riverside Health System, and Leslie Baker, chief experience officer of Adjuvant.Health powered by Allied Physicians Group, presented the webinar “The COVID-19 Vaccine Is Being Distributed: Now What?” on Jan. 27.

From a scheduling standpoint, there’s nothing more frustrating for a healthcare organization than a recurrent pattern of patients showing up late or unprepared for appointments, late cancellations, and no-shows. It’s too late at that point to fill those appointment slots. It’s not only inefficient and wastes the time of staff members, but it can also be costly from a revenue perspective.

The situation is changing so rapidly when it comes to America’s COVID-19 vaccine distribution and prioritization strategy that if you blink, you might miss something important.

For the better part of a year, health organizations’ focus, and rightly so, has been on the COVID-19 pandemic, keeping patients safe, and more recently, distributing the vaccine. But it’s also important to recognize that due to fear of the coronavirus, many patients have avoided getting the care they need. Roughly 87 percent of healthcare leaders cited safety as the reason patients have deferred care during the pandemic.

It’s been a mixed bag in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic through the holidays and into the first few weeks of 2021. Vaccines are being distributed and administered, however nowhere near the 20 million doses the U.S. government expected would be dispensed by early January.

We made it.