“The coronavirus pandemic has sent shockwaves across the country’s entire healthcare industry. Health agencies at every level of government have responded quickly by committing to deliver uninterrupted, first-rate and safe care through telehealth and telemedicine.”
“The transformation underway at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) underscores the challenges and opportunities that COVID-19 is presenting to the healthcare industry, which is looking to re-think and re-imagine how to provide care to patients remotely. Even going back to pre-pandemic times, in November 2019, the VA announced that 900,000 veterans used its telehealth services in the 2019 fiscal year, a 17 percent increase over the year before…”
“The VA is not the only federal agency adapting to this need. Earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, for its part, waived restrictions on telehealth services “so that beneficiaries can receive a wider range of services from their doctors without having to travel to a healthcare facility.”
“Meeting the Telehealth Challenge
Telehealth challenges for healthcare CIOs extend far beyond simply using technology to connect doctors with patients. Other obstacles include patient identification and tracking, managing communications between sites, as well as the impact of remote workers and how organizations can protect data and meet compliance requirements. To be successful amid these circumstances, IT infrastructure and data must be scalable, available and adaptable to evolving healthcare provider needs and use cases…”
“Availability
“Scaling infrastructure isn’t just a nice-to-have requirement of mass-market telehealth; it is essential if medical professionals are to securely and rapidly access data from any location and device. As agencies rely on diverse infrastructures that encompass public cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premises data center environments, they must be able to control, integrate, move and consistently manage all of this data…” Read the full article here.
Source: Are agency IT infrastructures ready to meet coronavirus telehealth challenge? – By Chris Ginder and Jim Jessup, July 1, 2020. Federal News Network.
