Academic and Research Skills
Health Services Research
Quality Improvement/Patient Safety
Scholarly Sessions
Telemedicine/EHR/Medical Informatics
Christina Olson, MD
Associate Professor
Telehealth
University of Colorado School of Medicine/ Children's Hospital Colorado
Aurora, Colorado, United States
Challenges with providing in-person care during the COVID-19 pandemic led many pediatric practices and health care systems to rapidly implement telehealth in response to patient needs. The innovation that occurred out of necessity is a silver lining of the pandemic, with many telehealth advancements likely to become permanent. However, as we look toward the post-pandemic era of health care delivery, it is critical to evaluate past and current data to understand which telehealth services should remain, which should be adapted and which should be retired.
The SPROUT-CTSA Telehealth Collaborative Network has developed publicly available research and quality improvement resources to guide pediatric health care teams seeking to rigorously evaluate their telehealth services. These tools, including a four-domain evaluation and measurement framework, an economic evaluation framework and a policy stakeholder evaluation framework, are essential as in-person research and quality improvement approaches do not often account for virtual care delivery factors that require focused consideration.
This Hot Topics Symposium will include presentations on these new research and quality improvement resources, best practices for adapting them to current needs and use cases, reasons why telehealth services may require a different evaluation approach than in-person care, and the importance of considering digital health disparities when evaluating telehealth. The presentation will conclude with tips on scaling these evaluation frameworks to large health systems and small independent practices, the incorporation of virtual research tools into telehealth evaluation, and time for audience discussion.
Speaker: David McSwain, MD MPH – UNC Health
Speaker: John Chuo, MD, MS, IA – University of Pennsylvania, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Speaker: Brooke Yeager McSwain, MSc, MA, RRT – American Heart Association
Speaker: Christina Olson, MD – University of Colorado School of Medicine