Introduction: COVID-19 Digital Ambulatory Solutions
The CDC effort on Bringing Guidelines into the Digital Age has led to a longitudinal, multidisciplinary effort around rapid development and deployment of evidence-based clinical solutions into clinical settings using health IT tools. This group has recently spun off three efforts around the COVID-19 crisis in the US with the goal of rapidly filling data and clinical evidence gaps in different clinical settings: ambulatory care, home and long-term facility care, and inpatient/ICU care. We invite you to join us as part of a multidisciplinary effort addressing the COVID-19 crisis using health IT, case management and population health tools to address ambulatory care gaps in the current pandemic. Your clinical and information technology skills will bring critical front-line perspectives to work alongside health IT experts to translate ideas into actual implementations at the COVID-19 point-of-care.
These teams are launching their initial efforts this week and open to participation to any interested parties but particularly interested in clinician and implementation experts, who bring the critical front-line perspective to the work along with HIT experts who have experience coding and translating this content to the point of care.
What does the ‘work’ entail?
An example of a potential use case is listed here:
Community Health Center X has dramatically changed their practice because of the COVID-19 crisis, moving most of their visits to virtual, creating hours for a “COVID clinic” and a “non-COVID clinic”. Staff who have been diverted from their regular activities (dental assistants, for example) are being asked to staff phone screening and care management activities. The team identifies a need for guidance documentation and workflow for these phone visits to ensure the correct questions are asked and the responses are recorded, and that these data go into the record in a way that allows a case report form to be partially populated and to direct patients to the right clinic and resources and that this content is evidence-based and can be updated as research and recommendations change.
If you or a member of your team is interested in participating, please send an email to jskapik@nachc.com. If you are interested in a group other than or in addition to the Ambulatory workgroup, please indicate this in your response. You may share this information with other individuals who may be interested outside of the society itself if you believe there to be strong expertise or interest that would support the cause.
Get involved, stay mentally active and make a difference while gaining experience in the virtual clinical setting and implementation sciences! Thank you for your interest and we are looking forward to working together with you as we strengthen our arsenal against COVID-19.
Please see our Design Brief for more on the approach: COVID-19 DAS Design Brief
Review and contribute to our Use Cases for more information on the specific tools we are working on: Use Case Planning
Our meeting agendas and minutes are available here: COVID-19 DAS Meeting Management