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Master of Public Health

Rapid Development of Telehealth Capabilities within Pediatric Patient Portal Infrastructure for COVID-19 Care: Barriers, Solutions, Results

AUTHORS

Patel PD , Cobb J , Wright D , Turer R , Jordan T , Humphrey A , Kepner AL , Smith G , Rosenbloom ST , . Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA. 2020 4 17; ().

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 national emergency has led to surging care demand and the need for unprecedented telehealth expansion. Rapid telehealth expansion can be especially complex for pediatric patients. From the experience of a large academic medical center, this report describes a pathway for efficiently increasing capacity of remote pediatric enrollment for telehealth while fulfilling privacy, security, and convenience concerns. The design and implementation of the process took two days. Weekly enrollment subsequently increased 10-fold for children (age 0-12 years) and 1.2-fold for adolescents (age 13-17 years). Weekly telehealth visits increased 200-fold for children and 90-fold for adolescents. The obstacles and solutions presented in this report can provide guidance to health systems for similar challenges during the COVID-19 response and future disasters.

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