Telehealth Helps The Mayo Clinic Adjust to a New Healthcare Ecosystem

Like so many other health systems, the Mayo Clinic ramped up its telehealth platform to address the coronavirus pandemic, adopting digital health tools and processes that normally would have taken a decade to put in place.

Now, the Minnesota-based health system is dealing with the challenges associated with sudden growth, and looking to create a connected health network that can seamlessly accommodate both in-person and virtual care. And that means making sure the consumer-friendly front door meshes with the clinician-friendly back end.

Cris Ross, the Mayo Clinic’s chief information officer, says the COVID-19 crisis forced the health system to adapt at a rapid rate, moving from about 4 percent of virtual visits before the pandemic to 85 percent during the roughest days of late spring and early summer. Supported by emergency federal and state mandates that loosened constraints on telehealth, they were able to create pathways that improved care management for patients outside the hospital.

“We learned a lot about what consumers like and don’t like,” Ross says, noting the Mayo Clinic mHealth app is now used by about 70 percent of the health system’s patients. “Now we really need to define consumer-friendly healthcare.”

Ross says the challenges faced now are similar to those faced by health systems adapting to electronic health records platforms. Roughly 10 years ago, providers were struggling to modernize a paper-based system, creating digital pathways to adhere to Meaningful Use and HITECH.

“The task then was to automate our industry prior to digitizing it,” he says. “And to a large degree we’ve been able to do that.”

It’s not easy adapting to an EHR – many health systems still haven’t done it, much to the chagrin of either the health system or the EHR vendor. But many have, and in doing so they’ve automated what Ross calls “everything that doctors need to get their work done.”

COVID-19 changed that.

For the most part, Ross says, healthcare was organized around in-patient care, focused on what the provider needed inside the building to get things done. The pandemic turned that upside-down, pushing care outside the hospital, clinic or doctor’s office and forcing providers to use new tools and platforms – technology that often was more familiar to the consumer than to the provider.

In addition, providers were faced with new data and information that they hadn’t had before. Not only were they getting information about their patients and from their patients at home, through digital health devices and portals – they had access to an “overwhelming” amount of medical knowledge at their fingertips, through clinical decision support tools and online sites. This had been developing gradually before COVID-19, but the pandemic served to highlight how the process of delivering care was and could be changing.

“Remember – we were largely a paper industry just a decade ago,” says Ross. That’s a lot to take in in just 10 years.

As the coronavirus continues its course and the healthcare industry looks to adapt to a new health environment, Ross says health systems like the Mayo Clinic – which is now seeing more than a million users on its app – have to modernize the back end to meet the front end.

Providers need to learn how to gather, sort and use the information they’re getting from sources outside the hospital, either by running it through the EHR or alongside that platform. They’re not substituting one for the other, Ross points out, but developing lines of care that adjust to both platforms. Care that has to be delivered in person will be done in person, while services that can be delivered virtually will be accommodated.

“We need to create a digital infrastructure for healthcare,” he says.

Much of that will be driven by consumer preferences, similar to what the travel and banking industries have learned. Healthcare has to be like Netflix rather than Blockbuster.

“We’ve learned 10 years’ worth of experience in about six months,” Ross says. “It takes time to sort that out.”