In this white paper, Jeff Shelmire, Vice President of Professional Services, explores how Vee Healthtek smoothly transitioned to a work-at-home model despite a global pandemic. Jeff also talks about the future of healthcare, specifically telehealth.
Click on the video to the right to learn more about the author, his paper’s key points, and his motivation for writing on this subject.
To discuss this white paper in more detail, please contact Jeff using the information provided at the bottom of the page.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity are major considerations when companies evaluate business partners. Since its inception, Vee Healthtek has understood that in order to attract and retain the best clients, we need to have the business model, the talent, and the infrastructure to stand up to the intense scrutiny that comes with servicing internationally-renowned clients.
Acting decisively and quickly, at the outbreak of COVID-19, Vee Healthtek engaged its business continuity plan so that our employees could stay safe and healthy and service to our clients could remain uninterrupted.
Of primary importance was assuring the safety and health of our employees. Prior to any government announcement regarding shelter at home orders, Vee Healthtek immediately started taking precautions and sent a large portion of its workforce home. Because of the investments in infrastructure the company has made, we knew that we could effectively enable the exacting security protocols to keep our clients' work safe. In fact, we had validated through testing and rehearsals that these protocols would provide our clients with a highly secure processing environment. The question was, how would our clients react to work being processed outside of our highly secure work centers?
The key to our success is the close relationships we developed with our clients over the course of several years. Vee Healthtek works with a large portion of the most reputed names in healthcare. We have a large client base, and our company is not reliant on any single client for its financial health. All the same, we treat each client as they are the most important in the world to us…and they are… especially to those individuals at Vee Healthtek who are responsible for servicing the account.
The team takes tremendous pride and personal satisfaction in helping each client achieve success. Our clients have come to know that Vee Healthtek consistently delivers accuracy, competency and teamwork. We spend a lot of time in our client’s offices working alongside of them, working as a team to solve problems and to deliver high-quality solutions.
As the crisis hit, we communicated clearly, effectively, and frequently with each of them. We explained that all computers would be locked down with the same requirements as if in the office: Password policies, bit locker encryption, external ports disabled, print screen disabled, etc. Further, all at-home workers connect to our clients using the Vee Healthtek Compliance Node through an encrypted VPN. The Compliance Node is an Amazon Web Services HIPAA compliant interface which assures protection of patient health information (PHI).
Additionally, we made certain that we stayed closely informed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This meant that Vee Healthtek was fully prepared with coronavirus (COVID-19) ICD-10 codes and HCPCS codes being added for non-CDC laboratory tests.
It is because of the high degree of trust in our client relationships and in the preparedness and precautions the company made prior to the outbreak of the virus, that overwhelmingly our clients agreed to continue to have their work processed by Vee Healthtek in the Work from Home (WFH) format.
What will the world look like post-COVID-19? The world wants to know. Something Vee Healthtek has given a lot of consideration to, are the places where consumerism, technology, and healthcare intersect. We see this evolving quickly because the pressures coronavirus has put on the healthcare system.
Counterintuitively, one of the hardest hit industries from COVID-19, financially speaking, is healthcare. In fact, the healthcare industry has been disproportionately hit compared to other industries. According to a May 2020 survey of health system CFO’s conducted by McKinsey, "Thirty percent of respondents expect that their 2020 operating margin will be 20 percent below forecasts, and 15 percent are not confident that they will have enough days’ cash-on-hand throughout the crisis."
Out of concern for public health, clinics and doctor offices have been closed. Elective procedures have been postponed. This has put a tremendous economic burden on healthcare providers whose revenue has evaporated because of COVID-19. Also, these measures have caused many people to slack off in getting routine care for acute or chronic conditions. This has caused some patient’s health conditions to deteriorate due to the delay in care. Furthermore, the mental health of many patients has been challenged with the stress of the virus, unemployment due to virus-caused economic recession, and distance from loved ones due to social distancing measures enacted.
To the rescue comes technology. Today, telemedicine is helping doctors and patients to carry on with giving and receiving care. In many routine matters, telemedicine is a viable alternative to in-person doctor visits. Using a combination of telephone and video technologies, doctors are able to visit with patients and provide care remotely. To enable this process, Vee Healthtek has built a telemedicine platform that facilitates the scribing, coding, and billing of these doctor-patient encounters. Because of the convenience to both physician and patient alike, we predict that Telemedicine will continue to grow in popularity in the post-COVID-19 world.
But telemedicine isn’t all. Today, devices such as wristwatches and ancillary devices such as blood glucose monitors, pulse oximeters, and even matchbook-sized EKG machines are readily available to consumers at prices so affordable, that it would have been unthinkable only a decade ago. Digital home assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Home keep us more connected to information and digital content than ever before. Doorbells have turned into alarm and residential surveillance systems. Thermostats are self-adjusting, and even refrigerators can take inventory of their contents. We live in a highly technology-enabled connected world. The Internet of Things (IOT) is mainstream.
What does this have to do with healthcare, you ask? Simple. We measure and collect more data concerning our health than ever before. Anybody with a smart phone can track daily health statistics easily and very often automatically. How far we walk, how fast we walk, how frequently we stand, calories burned, pulse rate, blood pressure, blood glucose levels, sleeping patterns, and list goes on. Sharing this information with physicians is valuable in terms of helping them ascertain the maintenance of the health of their patients, and it helps them spot potential areas of concern in their patient’s well-being.
On the business office side of the house, just about every health system in America is determining what business functions make sense to automate and figuring out how to go about it. They are looking to solve the technology dilemma. That is, where should they make technology investments and how they arrive at a place where the output and quality of work is consistently high and predictable?
Within the Vee Healthtek delivery model, we use technologies such as robotic process automation, NLP and artificial intelligence to arm our people with the greatest tools to perform the work they do every day—whether it be in healthcare, engineering, or IT solutions. In this way, our clients don’t have to gamble their budgets on new technologies, which may or may not perform. Instead, they can use Vee Healthtek as the canary in the coalmine.
In other instances, we use technology that our clients have sourced or technology that we have purchased. In any case, each of these approaches is designed to help us better serve our clients in an evolving market. Disruption always creates opportunity and our approach is to embrace these changes while keeping an eye toward the future so that we can stay competitive and advise our clients on the best approach to take.
Our proven processes, which have been tightly honed over the course of a decade, are the wellspring of our company’s development and use of technology. We perfected the processes first, then we determined where automation can add value. In taking this approach, where we come from the technology dilemma from the process angle, our clients are able to increase output, improve quality while at the same time keep staffing levels in check. Technology enables us to bend the production curve and affords economies of scale. This we do while providing best-in-class service levels for our clients.
Furthermore, we continue to evolve our services so that our clients can stay ahead of disruption. Because of Sona College, we are able to recruit and develop the industry’s brightest minds in healthcare, engineering and IT to deliver sustainable solutions to serve our clients’ needs today and into the future.
In conclusion, it is the combination of highly educated people, proven processes, and leading technologies that makes the difference. Combined, these elements are what allow Vee Healthtek to provide extraordinary outcomes to our clients.
