A recent article in the Las Vegas Review Journal praised the team at HealthCare Partners Nevada for their efforts to expand telehealth services for patients amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The group of caregivers and clinics in southern Nevada is owned by Intermountain and has offered telemedicine appointments for years, but adoption has increased dramatically starting in mid-March.
The Review Journal article featured Las Vegas resident and patient Chester Bailey, who says he enjoyed his first ever telehealth visit with his primary care doctor at HealthCare Partners Nevada.
Chester told the Journal that when a HealthCare Partners Nevada caregiver asked if he’d be OK with a telemedicine appointment, “I was actually shocked. I didn’t know they could do that stuff.”
He said he was glad he didn’t have to go to his doctor’s office in person where he might have been exposed to someone who’s sick. And he said figuring out how to do an appointment via video was “simple stuff. It was like seeing my doctor on television, you know?”
HealthCare Partners Nevada CEO Mark Price told reporters telemedicine went from being a “very small percentage of visits” to about two-thirds of all their appointments. “The pace of innovation and change in healthcare in the last month has been faster than anything I’ve seen in my career,” Mark told the Journal. “We’re meeting the patient where they are and doing whatever what they’re comfortable doing.”
The Review Journal article says many groups have struggled to adopt telehealth visits because billing was difficult and reimbursement rates were low, but the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced March 30 it’s issuing new rules and waiving or relaxing other requirements to ease use of the service.
Although there are some drawbacks and limitations to using telehealth for patient visits, it also has many benefits and several experts cited in the article hope we’ll be able to continue using telehealth much more often even after the COVID-19 outbreak subsides.