MedStar Health News

Effective today, William “Bill” Sheahan begins serving as the new chief innovation officer and a vice president of MedStar Health, as well as the executive director of the MedStar Institute for Innovation (MI2). 

The MedStar Health telehealth and philanthropy teams have partnered to produce a summary titled, “One year of historic change and care: COVID-19 telehealth response.”

As health systems deploy a variety of digital health tools in the fight against COVID-19, new MedStar Health research published in Nature Partner Journals’ npj Digital Medicine suggests one of the latest technologies may help in unexpected ways—chatbots, or conversational agent software programs that communicate via text and voice.

MedStar Health announced launching a two-year telehealth research collaboration with Intermountain Healthcare and Stanford Health Care this month thanks to a nearly $1 million R01 grant award from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

In late October, MedStar Health surpassed a transformational care milestone of delivering more than 500,000 telehealth sessions during the COVID-19 pandemic, made possible by both a decade of foundational telehealth work and rapid crisis response and scaling starting in March 2020

As Emergency Departments (EDs) work to best address unique challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic, a study recently published in The Journal of Emergency Medicine by a multidisciplinary MedStar Health team details how integrating telehealth into the ED workflow can reduce healthcare provider infection risk, personal protective equipment (PPE) use, and ED length of stay (LOS), among other benefits.