OSF HealthCare Uses Telehealth, RPM to Treat COVID-19 Patients at Home

OSF HealthCare has launched a state-based telehealth program that uses remote patient monitoring concepts to triage and treat Coronavirus patients in their homes.

The Illinois-based, 14-hospital health system’s Pandemic Health Worker (PHW) program, unveiled this past weekend with help from Governor JB Pritzker, sends an mHealth kit to qualified patients, who monitor their health and stay in touch with nurses at a newly created OSF call center over a two-week period. If the patient’s condition worsens, more mHealth tools are sent to the home and the care program is enhanced, up to the point that hospitalization might be required.

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The program, developed by OSF HealthCare Saint Gabriel Digital Health in collaboration with OSF Innovation, has registered 237 patients in roughly two weeks. It has the capability of serving some 8,400 people per month.

“We’ve been brainstorming a lot of different ideas, and this … is the right way to bring healthcare out into the community,” says Jennifer Junis, the health system’s Senior Vice President. “It gives us a layered approach” to treating patients infected with the virus.

“The PHW program will allow us to fulfill our Mission of serving with the greatest care and love, utilizing digital technology and trained compassionate and trusted pandemic health workers to support individuals where they are most comfortable, in their own homes,” Lisa DeKezel, President of OSF’s St. Mary Medical Center, said in a press release.

According to Junis, the program builds on recent telehealth and mHealth efforts to address the COVID-19 emergency, which has infected more than 25,500 Illinois residents and killed almost 950 as of April 16.

Initially, the health system deployed its chatbot and a text messaging platform to address the concerns of patients calling in. Officials also turned an auditorium into a 100-person call center, offering callers immediate access to care providers. Within a couple weeks, that call canter had fielded more than 30,000 interactions.

But as the numbers of potentially infected residents soared, administrators realized they had to move quickly from triage to a more comprehensive treatment plan – one that managed traffic to the hospitals, reduced the chances of hospital staff becoming infected, and gave patients access to the tools they would need to ride out the pandemic at home.

“We knew that this wouldn’t be enough,” Junis says. “So we moved on to the next phase.”

Using the telehealth underpinnings of OSF’s RPM platform for chronic care management – called Virtual Advanced Care – the health system created a community-based program that would be administered out of eight regional hubs. Staff were taken from other departments and trained as “mission partners,” who would be dispatched to a patient’s home to drop off the telehealth kit.

To qualify for the program, a patient calls into the COVID-19 Nurse Hotline and answers questions from a nurse. Those either at high risk of contracting the virus or showing early symptoms but not to the point of requiring emergency or inpatient care are invited to join, and those who agree are issued a telehealth kit, which includes a laptop with pre-loaded mHealth apps, including an online connection to telemental health services through SilverCloud Health.

From that point, the patient monitors his or her health and communicates twice a day with a nurse by phone or virtual visit. If the symptoms worsen, the patient transitions to the Acute COVID@Home program, which includes mHealth tools and direct supervision from a physician or advanced practice provider.

Because the program is supported financially by the state, OSF is monitoring a number of benchmarks, including the number of patients enrolled, number of patients who decline to join, number of patients who finish the program, total telehealth encounters and escalations in care. The health system is also measuring patient engagement and staff support through surveys.

In addition, with the state’s support OSF is looking at partnership with other health systems in Illinois to make PHW a statewide program.

While the program is tailored to tackle the Coronavirus crisis, Junis expects that they’ll apply lessons learned to other RPM programs for other patient populations. The program might also serve as a model for future emergencies where a telemedicine platform needs to be rolled out and scaled up as quickly as possible.