Are You Steering Your Telehealth Success?

…or are you drifting rudderless on the virtual care ocean?

Clear is Kind. Unclear is Unkind — Brené Brown

Accountability breeds response-ability. — Stephen Covey

During the Covid-19 health crisis many organizations hastily launched telehealth. For many it was a stop-gap measure — an interim, makeshift alternative to the “traditional care”. Yet, telehealth in the form of video visits has been around for many decades. The longest-running telehealth programs have been around since the mid 1990s.

By now, most healthcare leaders have recognized that Telehealth is here to stay — and that it is a powerful care delivery modality that many “modern healthcare consumers” very much prefer — if it is done right.

What’s fascinating to consider (if you take a minute to think about it) is that the full embrace of telehealth as a viable part of an integrated care delivery model is the inevitable state of the future. The modern healthcare consumer has in the past decade already voted with their wallet — and now they’re voting with their mouse clicks, too.

As with any ship, without proper steering, the boat will drift aimlessly, guided only by the random wind and currents.?

So if you’ve realized that telehealth is valuable to your organization’s success, are you actively steering your telehealth success?

What is Telehealth Governance?

Most healthcare organizations only recognize governance from the perspective of an external board that governs the organization and is the CEO’s boss.

The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program defines governance as the “system of management and controls exercised in the stewardship of your organization.” Thus governance focuses at its core on the wellbeing and survival of the organization.

Telehealth, as a healthcare delivery service alternative to in-person care, requires, just like in-person care, the involvement of the whole organization: from clinicians to compliance, from schedulers to billing, from nurses to marketers. In order to implement a well-performing parallel care delivery system, it likewise requires the involvement of the leaders of the various functions.

As long as telehealth is “new” and requires changes to all parts of the organization, it should be supported through multi-departmental telehealth governance, such as a steering team. And with Telehealth just being the dress rehearsal for digital health, your steering team will have plenty of governing to do in the upcoming years.

Telehealth Governance Responsibilities

The basic responsibilities of a telehealth governance team are no different than those of great leadership: establish objectives, supply resources & support and hold the organization accountable.

Specifically, here are the three most important telehealth governance responsibilities:

1. Direct the expansion, growth, and continuous improvement of telehealth.
2. Allocate resources and remove obstacles to accomplish the goals set forth.
3. Provide accountability on the performance of existing and new telehealth services.

Provide Direction

The first challenge that a telehealth governance team needs to grapple with is the identification and prioritization of the key initiatives for the next months. Without the clarity of what to focus on, the organization’s progress will be limited: Do you want to launch a new telehealth service, e.g., with schools or between sites? Do you want to optimize telehealth performance? Do you need to select a new technology? Do you want to expand into remote physiological monitoring? Etc.?

Provide Resources

Once the priorities are clear, the steering team needs to provide the resources.?

That includes people (and people’s time):

• people to project-manage the initiatives to achieve the initiatives’ objectives?
• experts in clinical workflow design that can redesign the seven virtual care delivery workflows
• technology experts to aid in the proper selection and configuration of the technology that best fits the needs of the clinicians and patients
• operations support people with a great customer service attitude to provide training and just in time support and troubleshooting
• etc.

In addition to people, resources also include funding to invest in technology (hardware and software) or in outside expertise (such as telehealth advisors).

With so much competing attention for staff’s time (especially if the resources are not provided in adequate supply – e.g., by asking people to do the job of two people in order to avoid spending money on bringing outside expertise in), the steering team needs to provide accountability. If progress is not happening at the right pace the solution lies not in reprimands, but in allocating better or the right or more resources — or in helping to reprioritize competing priorities.

Providing Accountability

Finally, the steering team’s responsibility is to provide accountability:

• Establish a set of KPIs, or key performance indicators (here’s a description of 5 excellent Telehealth Metrics );?
• Establish targets for each KPI (e.g., what level of patient satisfaction is desirable?)
• Establish the processes and assign resources to collect, analyze, and present the KPIs

Once established, the steering team should periodically review the actual data, compare it against its goals and, if targets are not met, to enact corrective actions to align the actual performance with the goals.

The Elements of Telehealth Governance

To establish and run an effective Telehealth Steering Team, here are some additional considerations.

So who should sit on an effective governance board? Ideally, a cross-representation from the various functional areas such as executive leaders, clinicians, operations, finance, and technology, etc. Depending on the size of the organization and the leadership culture, the individuals can be senior leaders, departmental leaders, or delegates.

In very small organizations, Telehealth Governance may simply be a monthly recurring topic on the executive leadership’s agenda. In larger organizations, middle managers and subject matter experts will make up the composition of the team.

And the leadership? Since telehealth is not a technology, not a set of workflows, but rather a clinical and a strategic tool, the leadership of Telehealth Governance should come from a clinical-administrative partnership. In larger organizations, a clinician is designated as medical director of telehealth or virtual care. In smaller organizations it may be a clinician with strong affinity for telehealth or the chief medical officer.

Overall, the investment in telehealth governance is cheap compared to the alternative of grossly underperforming telehealth. If your healthcare delivery organization is not taking advantage of the various ways to connect with? your patients “at a distance” you are leaving patients behind and money on the table .?

Telehealth can provide a great positive return on investment, but only if a multidisciplinary steering team is providing the direction, resources, and accountability.

Would you like to discuss how to establish or breathe new life into telehealth steering team? Then reach out to Christian to set up a call to discuss.

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Have you attended Telehealth T-Time: A Community for Telehealth Enthusiasts yet? This monthly, FREE event always features networking opportunities and three presentations by fellow telehealth experts. Check it out!

Christian Milaster and his team launch, expand, and grow Telehealth Programs for rural health centers, behavioral health agencies, health systems, schools, and libraries. Christian is the Founder and CEO of Ingenium Digital Health Advisors where his team and consortium of experts partner with healthcare leaders to enable the delivery of extraordinary care by accelerating the adoption of digital health innovation.

To explore how we can help your organization solve your challenges, contact Christian by phone or text at 657-464-3648, via email , or video chat .