Hospital chief information officers, no strangers to emergencies, are putting in place new systems and workflows to get ahead of a growing coronavirus epidemic that threatens to tax limited resources and staff.
Their tasks include greenlighting telemedicine projects to reduce expected patient gridlock, developing digital dashboards to speed triage, and testing and retesting systems expected to allow staff to work remotely.
“You don’t want to totally overreact, but on the other hand, you don’t want to be falling behind,” said Nader Mherabi, CIO at NYU Langone Health in New York.
NYU Langone is asking its partners and vendors to be on standby to increase bandwidth and server capacity in case nonessential workers in departments like finance are asked to work from home.
“We just don’t know how long this is going to last,” Mr. Mherabi said. “You don’t want to spend too much money to buy capacity, but you also want to make sure that you are ready.”
More than 800 cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University as of Tuesday afternoon. Twenty-eight people have died.
“CIOs at health systems are thinking about, “How do I extend my care team that’s already strained in terms of resources, and mitigating some of the risks of their exposure,’” said Arielle Trzcinski, senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc.’s health-care practice.
A patient calling a physician’s office will receive an email with a link allowing the doctor and patient to start a video consultation. The hospital hopes to deploy this technology next week.St. Luke’s University Health Network in Pennsylvania is testing a videoconferencing tool targeting older patients, the most vulnerable to coronavirus, who don’t use the hospital’s mobile-device based telemedicine tools and prefer using a desktop or laptop.
To support the new telemedicine effort, the health system also is speeding up software upgrades to Microsoft Corp. ’s Windows 10 and Office 365 on PCs at about 60 locations. Doctors will use Microsoft Teams as a collaboration tool for videoconferencing with patients and, if necessary, with other specialists.
“We are maximizing our patient protection and our provider protection in managing these patients. However, we are also recognizing the unique nature of Covid-19 and how we have to deal with that in a little different way,” said James Balshi, chief medical information officer at St. Luke’s.
Providing caregivers easy access to data about the coronavirus is proving to be a top task for hospital CIOs.
Executives are also adjusting workflow systems so doctors have a single source to access all the data needed to screen patients and determine if they need to be isolated. The screening process at many hospitals includes gathering information based on questions unique to the coronavirus outbreak, such as places a patient has visited, or who they have been in contact with.
Mount Sinai Health System in New York has developed a digital repository of information in the form of a dashboard created specifically for the coronavirus in its electronic-health record software. Doctors and nurses can view screening information, X-rays, lab tests and other relevant data so caregivers can collaborate on treatment.
But it is too early to develop more sophisticated AI or data-driven tools, said Bruce Darrow, deputy chief information officer at Mount Sinai.
“Right now we have extremely limited data on the number of patients who are confirmed Covid-19 positive at this point, so we don’t have those tools yet,” he said.
