MedStar Health News

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.

MedStar Health’s telehealth, human factors, and research teams authored two recently-published research articles to share lessons learned while helping the system navigate telehealth’s exponential growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the peak of the spring 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, MedStar Health conducted more than 4,500 telehealth encounters each weekday to ensure safe and efficient care for our patients, providers, and communities. By May 1, the system had reached the significant milestone of more than 100,000 telehealth sessions delivered in total during the pandemic.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has awarded $976,679 to MedStar Health to provide additional support for the exponential growth of the system’s telehealth offerings in response to COVID-19. As of early July, MedStar Health had delivered more than 275,000 telehealth sessions during the pandemic.