Telemedicine & Remote Patient Monitoring

The way that patients receive healthcare has changed immensely since the start of the pandemic, and even the traditional in-person appointment with a provider has become more difficult. However, Orlando Health’s already established telehealth services were available and ready for patients from the beginning. The organization had been utilizing telehealth services for almost a decade prior to the pandemic, and this experience and expertise became vital as a majority of patient visits quickly transitioned to a virtual format. The easing of regulations due to COVID-19 allowed the health system to expand its telehealth services and better accommodate the needs of patients.

The organization’s expanded telehealth services offered greater conveniences to patients, keeping them safe at home during the pandemic and offering extended hours for additional flexibility. Patients can visit with their primary care physician or specialists, receive on-demand care for minor medical problems, be evaluated and treated for rehabilitation care and receive a consult for COVID-19 care all from the comfort of their home. Orlando Health providers are available via telephone call or video chat to help patients in the setting that is most comfortable and appropriate for them.

Orlando Health now has more than 29,000 registered virtual visit users and has completed over 300,000 virtual visits to date, with over 200,000 of those visits occurring since the start of the pandemic. The organization also has conducted more than 12,000 On Demand visits in 2021 alone. On Demand visits offer urgent care to patients in any location, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The health system also offers remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices that allow patients to interact with their physician every day from the comfort of their homes. The patient’s medical data is shared across a secured network that allows the patient’s provider team to monitor their care without an in-person visit. On average, Orlando Health has over 190 patients utilizing remote patient monitoring devices each day. Additionally, patients who use RPM devices experience readmission rates less than 2.5 percent. This is another low-cost, high-tech solution to deliver quality care to our patients.

Comprehensive Health Record

Orlando Health successfully completed its multi-phase go-live schedule between January 2021 and July 2021 for its new Epic Comprehensive Health Record (CHR), known in the health system as ELLiE. All Orlando Health hospitals are now live on Epic, including Bayfront Health St. Petersburg. Since completing go-live implementation, the ELLiE core team has successfully completed it’s first “triple upgrade” – which was focused on fine tuning the CHR to include newer system feature enhancements and building optimizations to ensure the CHR is growing to meet the needs of our organization and community.

To promote and enhance the Orlando Health CHR ecosystem, OHN has offered system access to its community-affiliated providers via the CHR’s EpicCare Link portal. This portal is now supporting nearly 4,500 external users, providing easy access to records, enhanced referral and ordering capabilities and improved reporting tools. The platform also will allow providers to attest to close care gaps for quality measures.

As an added benefit of the CHR, historical payer claims data has been integrated in the provider workflow to supplement clinical data for quality measures, risk coding tracking, utilization oversight and general decision-making. The CHR’s quality measures also have been custom-built to mirror the value-based care contracts and offer useful, near real-time dashboards.

Epic’s Healthy Planet tool, the CHR’s population health management application, warehouses 56 discrete external data sources, including millions of medical and pharmacy claims received over time. In total, the platform will house historical data for nearly half a million value-based care lives that have been managed by OHN to date, including the actively managed 283,000 patient memberships.

Providers can leverage the Healthy Planet tools to glean in-depth clinical management insights, more efficiently exchange and access data, and better coordinate care with other system users for all of the network’s value-based care for patients.