Preparing Clinical Staff for Virtual Care Delivery

Virtual care is now essential to modern medicine. This shift has been astoundingly rapid: In a single week, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford saw its daily number of virtual outpatient visits jump from 20 to 400. Kadambari Beelwar, the California hospital’s telehealth manager, tells HealthTech that the number of visits surpassed 600 soon after that.

“Clinicians have been thrust into taking a history, performing physical exams and generating differential diagnoses using telehealth without any proper training or competency, or maybe even touching the equipment,” Ann Fronczek said in a webinar panel as part of the American Telemedicine Association’s 2020 conference. 

It’s time that organizations focus on the people who will truly make virtual care work.