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June 09, 2020 (Cleveland, OH)

VA Shares Telehealth Experience Under COVID-19

The VA Northeast Healthcare System is not alone in the dramatic increase it saw in the use of telehealth services under COVID-19. Many hospitals experienced the same shift from in-person to telehealth-based care delivery. But the VA was well positioned to ensure that its mental health, substance and opioid use disorder, and pain management services were able to smoothly manage this transition.

In a presentation in early May to the membership of the Northeast Ohio Hospital Opioid Consortium, the VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System’s Chief of Healthcare Technology, David Chmielewski, shared what the VA had in place prior to COVID that facilitated this shift.

The VA has long experience in telemedicine and has grown these services considerably in recent years to include not only their telehealth and home telehealth programs, but also a variety of other technologies. 

Last fiscal year, the VA treated over 17,000 patients using telehealth in Cleveland, for more than 69,000 telehealth visits in total. So far this year, they have already treated more than 17,000 patients and have completed more than 40,000 telehealth encounters. The largest increase has been in their video-to-home service, where they went from 350 encounters in February to more than 2,000 in March and around 6,000 in April.

The VA’s mental health, opioid and substance use disorder, and pain management services already were making significant use of telehealth prior to COVID. However, telehealth encounters in these services grew more than fivefold from February to April. In his presentation, Chmielewski shared both how the VA responded to the transition in care delivery under COVID, and also the processes and practices in place beforehand that facilitated it. View his presentation online to learn more about the VA’s telehealth experience.

For more about the Northeast Ohio Hospital Opioid Consortium, contact us.

TWEETABLE: Learn from the VA Northeast Ohio Healthcare System’s chief of healthcare technology how that system was prepared for the shift to telehealth, including for opioid use disorder treatment, during COVID-19.