As the nation contends with an unprecedented global health crisis, clinicians are meeting the moment with never before seen levels of team-based care and industry collaboration.
Healthcare is facing a never-before-seen global health crisis with the coronavirus outbreak, with infection rates on a meteoric rise. But at the same time, healthcare is seeing something else that’s unprecedented: a massive mobilization toward team-based care and industry collaboration.
Around the globe, the effects of the coronavirus are keenly felt. At the time of publication, some 551,337 people have the disease worldwide, while the death toll comes in at 24,906, per figures from Johns Hopkins University.
Healthcare is facing a never-before-seen global health crisis with the coronavirus outbreak, with infection rates on a meteoric rise. But at the same time, healthcare is seeing something else that’s unprecedented: a massive mobilization toward team-based care and industry collaboration.
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Around the globe, the effects of the coronavirus are keenly felt. At the time of publication, some 551,337 people have the disease worldwide, while the death toll comes in at 24,906, per figures from Johns Hopkins University.
But even as the death rate reaches into the hundreds, the US is also seeing people recover. At time of publication, Johns Hopkins can project 753 people have recovered from the disease, and that’s thanks to the tireless efforts of the medical frontline and public health community.
To be clear, healthcare does not yet have this pandemic pinned down, nor does it have an end date in sight. Medical professionals need all the help they can get — access to life-saving ventilators or the personal protective equipment (PPE) that is the first line of defense between a sick patient and a treating clinician.
But those challenges notwithstanding, healthcare has also broken down hurdles that experts have long heralded the biggest challenges in medicine.
Telehealth, for example, is now a dinner table subject, a far cry from the low consumer adoption numbers seen just months before COVID-19. Healthcare has also fast-tracked important provisions, namely interstate licensure, to make sure geography does not impede a patient’s ability to receive remote care.
Interoperability is also advancing, as health data experts chip away at a decades-old technology problem. One Florida-based health information exchange, HIE Networks, has retooled its systems to make it easier for providers to access patient health data regardless of where that patient has previously accessed care.
Notably, these advances have all come to deliver on a singular overarching goal: team-based care. Team-based care has been the ideal in healthcare since the industry began hurdling toward value-based payment models.
Healthcare providers are increasingly getting paid based on the value of care, instead of the volume of services rendered. And because of that, industry leaders identified a need to care for the patient from all angles efficiently, both inside and outside the clinical setting.
In the past, team-based care hasn’t been easy. Medical providers are used to working in siloes, drawing strict boundaries between themselves and other parts of the healthcare practice. Power hierarchies have made collaboration difficult, not to mention the technological limitations that abound.
But our present situation is different. As healthcare stares down a serious global catastrophe, challenges to team-based care are starting to fade.
Source: PatientEngagement HIT
