L.A. Care: Training for Family Caregivers Pays Off on All Levels
In Southern California, the L.A. Care Health Plan, as its website explains, is “the nation’s largest publicly operated health plan, serving more than 2.4 million members. The plan, focused on providing access to quality healthcare for the most vulnerable of Los Angeles County’s residents, has been moving forward to support those who are family caregivers for dual-eligible plan members; L.A. Care’s CEO John Baackes has been leading an initiative that is part of a large cluster of initiatives designed to improve the health status of the plan’s members. In that regard, nearly four years ago, the L.A. Care leaders established a ten-week training program, with 30-50 students in each cohort, and with classes given in English Spanish, various Chinese dialects, and Russian, to teach basic observation skills, as well as caregiver burnout skills. Over 4,200 have been trained, and have contributed to the improved health status of their loved ones. What’s more, Baackes explains, “We’re now monitoring the utilization of the healthcare services by the clients, and we’re beginning to get a body of data that shows that the utilization prior to the training goes down after the In-Home Support Service Worker goes through the training.”
Northwell Health: A New Era of Self-Service in Healthcare
When COVID hit, the volume of patients needing fast service and support increased rapidly. There was a sudden need for scaled remote solutions and additional communication on the organization’s digital patient experience app. Individuals were doing everything from home digitally, and they were expecting the same "digital normal" from their healthcare providers. In response, Northwell’s Digital Patient Experience team re-evaluated the patient journey in a “germy-map” designed to reduce physical touchpoints. The team quickly added COVID-19 digital resources for patients and employees including a chatbot, rapidly expanded telehealth offerings and online booking, added two-way SMS texting ahead of in-person ambulatory appointments, added the ability to book COVID-19 tests and vaccines to the app, and the ability to view results and vaccine status, streamlined account signup and verification, and adding family pooling functionality to allow caregivers to book appointments on behalf of others. As of December 2021, the organization has over 462,000 digital patient accounts with a growth of over 1,000 new accounts per day. Additionally, Northwell has collected over $227 million in revenue through the online payment center.
AU Health: Tele-CCU Program Provides Help for Medically Complex Rural Patients
AU Health is an academic medical center positioned in eastern Georgia in a region called the Central Savannah River Area (CSRA). AU Health is a Level 1 trauma center that support the 14 counties that comprise the CSRA. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, AU Health deployed a tele-critical care (tele-CCU) program to the hospitals across the CSRA due to these hospitals being rural locations. The tele-CCU was designed to provide critical care consults to these hospitals to help treat these more medically complex patients in their rural facility. The program has been successful and has treated well over 1,200 patients with 7,000 patient days. The transfer rate for these patients decreased drastically to where now 80 percent of the patients are staying in their rural hospital, whereas pre-pandemic all of these patients would have been transferred to a higher level of care. Since the program inception in July 2020, AU Health has added specialty services to the program including infectious disease, pulmonology, cardiology, and pediatrics.
UC Davis Health: Digital Health Platform Includes Digital Health Navigators
UC Davis Health has made major investments in its digital health platform, including Express Care that launched in September 2020, with the goal of creating a regional digital public health platform to improve access to and continuity of care for vulnerable populations in California. Designing and launching this program required a cross functional team of emergency department leadership, ambulatory operations, innovation technology, nurse triage, and billing/compliance experts. Now, all Californians can be seen through a direct to consumer, on-demand video visit. In the first year, Express Care physicians served over 10K patients. The scope of services enabled by this interface include online scheduling, on-demand telehealth visits, subspecialty referral and eConsult services, eVisits, wearable device monitoring, and on-demand tele-interpreting services for over 40 languages. Additionally, Digital Health Navigators recruited from the community provide culturally appropriate, high-quality care by preparing patients to effectively use the digital platform. The Navigators are key to assuring digital literacy and efficient access to care, particularly in our multi-lingual population.
