MON-005 Adoption and Integration of Telehealth Technology into Endocrine Practice

Abstract

Telemedicine/Virtual Health modalities of health care delivery are rapidly growing across the healthcare continuum. Telemedicine is a useful extension of a typical outpatient Endocrine practice to improve access to care, reduce travel time for patients and improve patient experience. The author will present a program review of a TeleEndocrine practice in the military using a variety of virtual health modalities: Synchronous video between military clinics and to patients homes, remote home monitoring in diabetic patients and asynchronous care delivery. Virtual consultative and management services are provided from our Military Medical Center to multiple military health systems sites located in Puerto Rico, Kentucky, Georgia and New York where there are no endocrinologists at those military sites. Data from over 300 encounters will be presented in terms of case mix, patient demographics, workload, coding and patient satisfaction. Patient experience was evaluated using a survey instrument to assess various domains of the TeleEndocrine consultation (equipment ease of use, video/audio quality, ability to communicate their clinical concerns, previous use of telehealth, perceptions of care deliveryand others. In our population, over 85% had never done a telemedicine consult in the past and of these respondents, 95% reported being satisfied overall with the TeleEndocrine consultation and 3.5 % reported that they would have preferred seeing an endocrinologist in person. In conclusion, telehealth technology adoption and integration into a general Endocrine practice clinical workflow was achieved using various capabilities and the patient experience with this technology was overall positive.