SR Health Blog

Free Webinar: 20 Tips from Health System Leaders and Industry Experts on Surviving COVID

Every healthcare organization is suffering financially amidst COVID-19. The only question is how much they are suffering. While everyone is dealing with the challenges brought on by COVID-19, there are a number of things healthcare organizations can do now to make sure that their organization recovers from the financial impacts and is well positioned to thrive in the future. Here are four I think every healthcare organization should be doing.

Within hours of one another, the federal government sent two powerful signals that telemedicine is here to stay, but permanency may not be as easy as expected. President Trump issued the "Executive Order on Improving Rural and Telehealth Access," declaring: “the expansion of telehealth services is likely to be a more permanent feature of the healthcare delivery system.” The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) subsequently released the 2021 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) Proposed Rule featuring a section: “Telehealth and Other Services Involving Communications Technology.”

Planning doesn’t work like it used to. The pandemic has prompted us to live more in the present. In some ways, this has been an unexpected blessing. In other ways, this makes our jobs as family members and business leaders difficult. 

Healthcare leaders should embrace the COVID-19 world as the new normal and stop going for temporary stop gap measures and being stymied by the reduction in revenue. COVID will stay with us at least for another 12 months, if not 18 to 24. More importantly, COVID already has and will continue to have long-lasting changes on the way we work, the way we communicate, and the way we receive healthcare.

In another recent post, we shared some of the latest data on how patient satisfaction SR Health by Solutionreach collected some of the last known data about pre-COVID-19 patient communication preferences when it commissioned a study in early 2020 to better understand patients’ communication likes and dislikes at four key parts of the patient journey: scheduling, patient care, financial, and patient outreach. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, SR Health conducted another survey to capture its impact on the same four parts of the patient journey, as well as on telehealth.

Over four months into the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home (WFH) and remote teams have become the norm for many industries. Telemedicine is in full swing and many of the major adoption, implementation, and reimbursement challenges have been worked out. On average, physicians, staff, patients, and their carepartners have gone through the learning curve and settled in to virtual care. In this virtual care world, where technology, workflows, policies, reimbursement frameworks, and the status quo have rapidly changed, why is the outdated concept of a patient still frozen in time?

SR Health by Solutionreach commissioned a two-part patient research study to better understand if COVID-19 impacted:

Healthcare has been moving toward a hybrid care model—a mix of in-person care and care at distance—since COVID-19 hit in early 2020. The need for this model will likely continue in some form through the pandemic and beyond. Success with hybrid care requires a series of workflow changes and technology adoptions that make it possible to easily support both types of visits. Below is a list of some of the important changes healthcare organizations should consider.

Free Webinar: 11 Brand New Patient Communication Survey Results and What They Mean 
Thursday, July 30
10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET
Presented by the SR Health researchers:
Justin Everette, VP, Marketing, SR Health by Solutionreach
Lea Chatham, Director of Content, SR Health by Solutionreach