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COVID-19 Update: Grasping one link at a time

March 25, 2020


COVID-19 Update: Grasping one link at a time

The past few weeks have truly been break-out weeks for telemedicine and virtual care. The chains of regulation and obscurity have fallen away, giving us an opportunity to step-up and equip our providers with the best tools possible in the fight against COVID-19.

It’s hard to capture everything that’s happened, but I wanted to share some of the major changes and trends I’ve seen.

Yesterday ONE Fabric customer trained almost 600 clinicians on our platform.  Those 600 clinicians will add 194,000+ visits/day of capacity to our nation’s health system. To break down the math, at (89 seconds/visit) x (600 clinicians) x (8 hours/day) = about 194,000 visits.

And it’s not just one of our health system partners. As Fabric has empowered health systems across the country to continue to meet the demand for COVID-19 screening and visits with virtual care, many people have asked how we’ve done it. The simplest answer is mathematical: asynchronous visits on our platform are 12x more efficient than video visits. We’ve proven the power asynchronous visits have in handling astronomical patient volumes.

Virtual Visits by Mode of Care in March, 2020

In less than a minute and a half a provider can assess a patient’s COVID-19 risk factors and can make an informed clinical decision – identifying whether patient education, self quarantine, further assessment from a clinician, or testing is needed.

In the past weeks we've also seen:

  • Rapid clinical updates to our platform, in real time, based on CDC guidelines.
  • New and complex clinical conversations around virtual care for treating much younger, older, and sicker patients.
  • A major influx in visit volume for both COVID-19 and overall virtual visits on our platform.
  • 87.9 percent of virtual visits across our health system partners completed through asynchronous care.
  • Our health system partners quickly training up to 600 new clinicians a day on our platform to ramp up their virtual clinical capacity.
  • The CDC encouraging the liberal use of telehealth tools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 
  • Emergency changes to telemedicine licensure and reimbursement laws
  • Continued daily increases to virtual visits and COVID-19 screening volume

I must also shed light on the human side of this pandemic. We’ve treated and screened more Americans than any platform in the past two weeks. We’ve seen the support calls/complaints from patients upset they are not being tested for COVID-19, even when they aren’t appropriate for testing.

We can talk all day about kit rationing, but the reality is that we want answers to whether we’re going to get sick. Or be separated from our kids or partners. Or lose our jobs. 

Stay strong, America. We are working tirelessly to deliver these assurances, alongside a multitude of other innovators and providers around the country.

When it comes to the journey ahead, Churchill offers solid wisdom for us: “It is a mistake to try to look too far ahead. The chain of destiny can only be grasped one link at a time.”

It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of what’s happened the past few weeks. What is clear is that we’ve taken a firm grip on the links in front of us.

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Asynchronous Care

Asynchronous Telemedicine Guide + COVID-19: The Largest Case Study on Async

When we built this guide, we set out to create a single comprehensive resource for everything healthcare professionals will ever need to know about asynchronous telemedicine. It’s 29 pages of pure data, research, and the largest case study ever conducted on async. 

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