Healthcare IT Blog

The more you can do to improve patient engagement, the better your staff can serve members of the local community. With so many health care providers working hard to cope with the spreading coronavirus pandemic, it’s useful to highlight different tools that help improve patient engagement, especially during the telemedicine, virtual experience we are living in today.

Not only are you working to serve the usual case load of patients in your community, you and your team are also contending with individuals who now present with possible symptoms of the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19. Making efforts more difficult is the need to triage patients showing up with symptoms such as coughs and fever from other ailments. 

How healthy are the people in your immediate environment, and how does their quality of health relate to others on a local basis as well as nationwide? In this day and age, the public is experiencing a lot of concern about the health of a country, city, town, and even at the household level. 

You’ve been working in the healthcare profession for some time now. While you have a good understanding of the fundamentals of your work, whether in a general practice or specialty, you are only just beginning to become acquainted with the topic of population health. 

With all the disruptions to the nation’s healthcare system and the additional pressures put on all of us to respond to the growing pandemic causing COVID-19 infections, there is certainly more at stake than people’s safety and well being. As the virus spreads, the nation is facing massive unemployment not seen since the Great Depression. Financial uncertainties and issues with the medical supply chain in turn make our efforts even more difficult.

The state of behavioral health and mental health services is changing, as we see a growing demand for help while the physical locations where treatment is normally made available are severely limited to avoid spreading the disease to healthy patients. 

As we strive to preserve people’s physical health and well-being during the pandemic of the novel coronavirus, it’s important to recognize COVID-19’s impact on mental health as well. The behavioral health/mental health industry is already seeing a major spike because of COVID-19 limiting individuals’ ability to see therapists or participate in group meetings.

These days, crowded waiting rooms and patients walking past one another on their way to examination rooms is becoming a health risk in its own right. The spiking cases of the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 infections has led countries to formulate policies about social distancing. The idea is to minimize the chance of infected individuals being able to spread the virus. 

As the world reacts to the growing threat of the new coronavirus, healthcare workers are on the front lines of the effort to combat this disease, safeguarding the population while also striving to protect their own health with limited supplies (including masks) while hospitals fear shortages of ICU beds and ventilators. 

Today in the United States, behavioral health practices of all sizes continue to operate using old-fashioned paper-based systems or generic office software that does little to help them keep their work organized and flowing efficiently.