ATA's Johnson Charts Telehealth Strategies During, After COVID-19

As healthcare providers embrace telehealth to take on the Coronavirus pandemic, Ann Mond Johnson is noticing a trend: They’re doing much more than just video visits.

“I think the biggest lesson learned is that telehealth is more than synchronous communication,” the CEO of the American Telemedicine Association says. “It’s more than video or virtual visits … It really includes asynchronous or chat-first or interactive assessments. It’s a broader acknowledgement that telehealth is more than just synchronous. It’s a much bigger field.”

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And the ATA has been busy making sure those lessons are being learned.

During a recent episode of Healthcare Strategies, the Xtelligent Healthcare Media podcast series, Johnson explained how the organization is helping the nation’s healthcare industry.

“I would say that our job is even more urgent,” she said, noting policy and legislative issues and inconsistent licensure rules as some of the biggest barriers to adoption. On the other hand, with some constraints eased through emergency declarations, both at the federal and state level, the ATA has the opportunity to highlight effective programs – particularly those which use different modalities and scale up quickly.

“It’s incumbent on us to keep on telling the stories,” she says.

The key, she says, is to highlight what works for providers at a time when in-person contact with patients is kept to a minimum.

“How do you help clinicians use telehealth easily and readily so that they can monitor and maintain relationships with their patients that don’t have COVID,” she asked, “or are maybe mildly symptomatic and don’t have a particular need to be seen in the hospital?”

Johnson says the pandemic is also pushing certain programs to the forefront, including remote patient monitoring, ICU care, physical therapy services, connected health opportunities for federally qualified health centers and hospice programs, and telemental health services for both patients and care providers.

“We’re certainly trying to showcase the best practices.”

With that in mind, the ATA is planning a full agenda for its annual conference, which was to have been held in Phoenix next month but will instead is scheduled as a virtual conference on June 22-26.

With that conference and elsewhere, Johnson says the ATA want to showcase effective telehealth and mHealth programs and concepts that will be needed to maintain the momentum once the pandemic has passed and the nation is in what will be called “the new normal.” This, she says, will serve to compel lawmakers to keep in place some, if not all, of the emergency measures passed during the emergency to support connected health.

“We do not want regulations to roll back if they have proven efficacy and value,” she says.