Health and Wellness Informatics News
Geisinger’s efforts are paying off with outstanding results in the virtual healthcare industry. They can achieve great success in decreasing referral queues from patients to a great extent with telemedicine.
The project shows astounding results, with 19,000 to 3,000 patients’ referral request falls.
Benjamin C. Gonzales, operations manager for virtual care at Geisinger, appreciated their team efforts. According to him, prominent health systems are facing difficulties in accessing behavioral healthcare. It’s not like the problem is new, but Geisinger’s population has faced the problem for three major reasons.
The first of which is the pandemic. The pandemic followed by Covid also increased the number of patients going off the charts. The immediate surge in demand left them with thousands of patient referrals at a standstill. The max out of referrals of 19000 was common at that time.
Secondly, the location also played a huge role in it. They say that the area they cover is mostly rural, and it’s difficult for them to recruit patients. Compared to Urban health care, it’s more difficult to recruit Rural patients.
The last is the community surrounding behavioral health stigma. People are also willing to accept the help. There are days when they get more than 400 referrals a day.
Seeing the surge in demand, Geisinger began looking for a vendor in 2020 to help build a health system. With the collaboration of Iris Telehealth, they begin their venture to create a solution with telemedicine.
Both teams work together to provide adequate IT and healthcare support. However, the ultimate goal was to create a solution to access behavioral health and take care of as many patients as they could.
The results were astounding in reducing the referral queue from 19,000 patients to 3,000. The key to this success is the bright minds working on the project and the surge in capacity created by the vendor team.
