Covenant Living Communities & Services

Emmanuel Patrick Palma Jr. MSN

Change is constant. In the last few years, we have seen change impact us in many ways. Within the healthcare industry, change can change operational processes, which may negatively impact how we deliver care. Despite this, we must embrace change, be agile, and approach it with a wider lens so we can develop and provide solutions for clinicians and patients.

Once the COVID-19 pandemic began, Covenant Living Communities and Services, just like others within the field of senior living healthcare, immediately felt the negative impact of the lack of provider presence at the bedside of residents. Within our own skilled nursing communities, obtaining bedside provider-level care became extremely difficult and required us to find solutions and take the next step with our healthcare technology. To be quite honest, investing in the evolution of healthcare delivery is essential in establishing and maintaining healthcare environments where patients can thrive. Moving forward in addressing our access gap and pushing to evolve our healthcare delivery modalities, we were confident that we could make a positive impact by implementing telehealth.

Being a newer model in accessing and delivering healthcare, we initially felt a natural skepticism. After reviewing various options and determining how we, as an organization, see telehealth supporting us, we decided on an option that provided us with a tool best fit for our patients. In our case, quick access to providers, along with an easy-to-use user interface and process, was critical to our mission. Using a phased approach, we implemented telehealth throughout our skilled nursing communities and began to see the impact it had on patient care throughout the organization.

Measuring four major areas throughout our implementation, we were able to determine how telehealth helped us evolve our healthcare operations and outcomes. Measuring the number of telehealth consults we conducted helped us gauge its adoption. Since our initial implementation, we have conducted more than 500 telehealth consults. As time moved on, telehealth became more accepted by patients, nurses, and physicians, which has benefited provider/nurse relations and an improvement in our rates of treating a patient in place instead of a trip to an emergency room.

In many ways, this has improved our patient’s outcomes by improving the efficiency of care delivery and experience. Of the consults we have conducted, 90% of those cases were treated within our communities. Furthermore, we have significantly reduced the time it takes to reach a board-certified provider that could assist in clinical assessments and care decisions. Of the consults conducted, nurses have only waited an average of 2.7 minutes for a provider to respond. Lastly, we have been able to significantly reduce our average readmission rate across the 12 skilled nursing communities that live with telehealth, which now stands at 5%.

Having implemented telehealth about a year ago, we are continuing to see great signs that this resource does work. We have improved the nurses’ ability to quickly obtain information and support from providers, even after hours. This has given the clinical staff a more efficient way to make decisions and deliver high-quality care. Not only have we improved care delivery and outcomes, but we truly believe we have evolved how the organization clinically operates. We have become more agile in decisions, and, despite a clinical staff shortage, we continue to provide high-quality care. By providing clinicians with mobile technology that can assist in clinical decisions, such as telehealth, we can improve how we approach care delivery and allow ourselves to take healthcare to the next level.