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Winter is Coming: Prepare for Cold and Flu with Virtual Care

August 2, 2018


Winter is Coming: Prepare for Cold and Flu with Virtual Care

For most people, the end of summer is characterized by back to school ads, discounted swimwear and the promise of crisp autumn air. In healthcare, it’s more than stacks of new notebooks – it’s time to plan for managing cold and flu season.

Each year, health systems and providers brace themselves for an onslaught of stuffy noses, hacking coughs and spiking fevers. And this year, as staffing plans are made and vaccine doses ordered, the question on everyone’s minds will be, “What do we do if we see a repeat of last year?”

If you work in healthcare (and unless you were, say, living off the grid in the Alaskan tundra last winter) a repeat of the 2017-2018 flu season likely strikes fear—or at least concern—into your heart. While not as terrifying as the white walkers in Game of Thrones, the onset of cold and flu season requires similar preparation to withstand a viral invasion. So, how can health systems deal with the visit volumes, the potential for infection to spread in waiting rooms, and overwhelmed clinic staff?

Virtual Care Can Help

Having a virtual care service in place can help mitigate some of the challenges that are part and parcel with cold and flu season. It’s not the only answer, certainly, but virtual care adds real value where it counts.

Support Vaccination

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” as the saying goes. It’s no secret that the best way to reduce influenza cases is vaccination, and health systems often have well-developed strategies for promoting annual influenza vaccination. A virtual care service can add value by creating an additional channel for patient communication.

Providers can remind patients to get their flu shots during video visits. Health systems can include a note about getting vaccinated in patient education materials. And, Zipnosis customers can use their virtual care platform to incorporate flu shot reminders into their virtual visit (a feature successfully deployed during last summer’s measles outbreak in Minnesota).

Manage Provider Time

Here’s where virtual care really shines. A store-and-forward / asynchronous virtual care model enables providers to diagnose and treat patients in a fraction of the time as an in-person visit, as noted by our VP of Customer Success, Catherine Murphy, a couple weeks ago.

In a look at data from six customers over the course of last flu season (October 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018), the average provider work time per asynchronous virtual visit was just shy of 2 minutes and maintained high quality standards. During that time, these six customers completed close to 12,000 visits, amounting to less than 340 provider hours. For comparison, 12,000 in-person visits at 15 minutes each would total about 3,000 hours. On average, virtual care saved each of these health systems 440 hours of provider time. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

Mitigate Waiting Room Infection

One of the biggest challenges about cold and flu is that they are just so darn infectious. A study in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology found greater than 3% increase in influenza-like illnesses in children and family members within 2 weeks of annual wellness visits.

Hospitals, health systems and clinics have a variety of tactics to help stem waiting room infection – from handing out face masks to regular sterilization procedures. Virtual care can be added to the list. By offering a remote option for treating highly infectious conditions like influenza, patients don’t have to come into their doctor’s office for treatment. Plus, patients with common conditions like urinary tract infections or pinkeye can also get treated at home, lessening the chance they contract an influenza-like illness at the doctor’s office or urgent care.

Now’s the Time

This isn’t Game of Thrones, and we aren’t facing an influx of white walkers, but winter is coming. Getting a virtual care service launched now will go a long way to help health systems manage the impact of cold and flu season on their providers and patients. Starting now will mean your virtual care service is up and running when it counts. Pair that with some smart marketing tactics, and you’ve got winning combination to combat the coming cold and flu season.

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