Health Pilots

A Telehealth Testing Ground

Episode Summary

To kick off 2022, we're excited to have Dr. Mai-Khanh Bui-Duy from Salud Para La Gente share the impact of her organization's work as participants in our Connected Care Accelerator (CCA). Mai gives us insight into the benefits of engaging with her fellow participants, as well as how the program has supported her ongoing journey to provide telehealth. Listen to learn about the challenge of shifting patients to video visits, resources shared and adapted by this learning collaborative, and more. The Center for Care Innovations is continuing the growth of this learning community with a new opportunity for California-based safety-net organizations to participate in the next phase of CCA, the Connected Care Accelerator: Equity Collaborative. The focus of work in this collaborative will be on innovation projects to advance equity in telehealth access. For more information and details on how to apply, head over to the Request for Applications page by visiting: careinnovations.org/connected-care-2022. Applications are due by March 16, 2022.

Episode Notes

To kick off 2022, we're excited to have Dr. Mai-Khanh Bui-Duy from Salud Para La Gente share the impact of her organization's work as participants in our Connected Care Accelerator (CCA). Mai gives us insight into the benefits of engaging with her fellow participants, as well as how the program has supported her ongoing journey to provide telehealth. Listen to learn about the challenge of shifting patients to video visits, resources shared and adapted by this learning collaborative, and more.

The Center for Care Innovations is continuing the growth of this learning community with a new opportunity for California-based safety-net organizations to participate in the next phase of this program, which will focus on innovation projects to advance equity in telehealth access. For more information and details on how to apply, visit careinnovations.org.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people, places, and ideas in this episode: 

© 2022 Center for Care Innovations. All Rights Reserved.

Episode Transcription

Wes Gabrillo (CCI):

Health Pilots is back for 2022 and we are kicking it off this year by sharing an exciting opportunity for those working to improve access to telehealth for California patients in historically underinvested communities. 

We have launched the Connected Care Accelerator: Equity Collaborative (CCAEC), a new program and learning collaborative designed to advance equity in telehealth access. 

And what better way to give us insight into the impact of working in the Connected Care Accelerator, than to have an alum share her experience. 

We welcome with us today Dr. Mai Bui-Duy from Salud Para La Gente. 

Dr. Bui-Duy also shares with us the benefits of participating in this collaborative as well as provides some recommendations for those interested in applying for the next “2.0” phase of this program.

Stay tuned to the end of the episode for details on where to learn more and how to apply for the Connected Care Accelerator: Equity Collaborative.

And now, over to you, Mai, and thank you for joining us.

Mai Bui-Duy, MD:

Good afternoon, everybody, my name is Mai Bui-Duy. I’m the Director of Health Information and Population Health over at Salud Para La Gente.

We are an FQHC over in Watsonville on the central coast of California, we serve over 28,000 patients, primarily Spanish speaking, many from the farm working community that we serve here. We participated in the CCA 1.0.

We had participated in some other CCI programs in the past, and what we were most excited about really is that opportunity to learn from each other - I think that it's just so invaluable.

There's so many ways that we are alike even if maybe our demographics are different, or the clinic sizes are different - there's so many other ways that we can connect and so learning from everybody's been really valuable.

Hearing people's experiences what they've tried, what hasn't worked, what's worked that we could tweak and adapt has been helpful in general, but I think something specific about the CCA that I really appreciated was really pushing us to provide what they called “artifacts.” So, tangible concrete resources. We were sharing out specific workflows, we were sharing specific scripting, specific patient education materials, and all with the intent of adapting it to whatever works for our clinics and patient population. I think that having something very tangible is super, super helpful.

Having participated in CCA 1.0 really helped us, obviously, during the pandemic, having to shift so completely from in-person to telehealth was a really big challenge, and there was so much that was, sort of, subpar using telephone visits - and having video visits, specifically, really helped us with access, and really providing quality care that patients needed. 

So, I’m biased – I'm an Adult Internist, and so I do a lot of Chronic Disease Management and I will say that video visits were just so important, just to do med reconciliation. A lot of our patients they'll say, “I take the big white pill, twice a day,” and you're saying, “I don't really know what that means - can you show me the bottle,” so they can hold up the bottle to the video, you can read the label for them, explain in more detail, etc. 

Video visits in general have been super helpful in terms of access, and then obviously, for our patients - as for many patients - transportation is a huge issue. Just taking time off of work - I've personally had patients do video visits from their cars, or they'll do it from home with children kind of helping them log on to video visits - just helps to save a lot of time and improves convenience for patients. So, it was a very big plus for us transitioning to the video visits.

And then just in terms of recommendations, one of the strongest recommendations I could say is the more that your senior leadership is on board, I think the smoother a lot of things flow downstream from there.

For us, we had our director of patient services involved as part of our core team involved in this program, myself - as both a clinician, but then also as a Director of Population Health, and then we had our Director of Behavioral Health on board. So we had quite a good amount of senior leadership, kind of actively participating - and that really helped to smooth the way, just to assign different resources to the project, to make things happen, to move it forward. 

So, I would say that is a big recommendation: the more you're able to engage your senior leadership, get the buy-in and hopefully get a little bit of time from them - that really helps a lot.

The other pieces, I would say is obviously we're talking about video visits - so tech is always going to be an aspect - and to really take your time.

Obviously, as the pandemic has gone on, many vendors have jumped into the space. And so, take your time - evaluate what you what your clinic needs and also your patient population.

For us, with video visits - we were already using Zoom and so there was a sort of healthcare option for Zoom. We're already using Zoom for video conferencing prior to the pandemic, and so it wasn't a big stretch to just tack on to Zoom and move in that direction for patient-related video visits.

Having said that, now we're running into issues around teaching our patients to download the Zoom app. Are there other vendors that are more web-based, and that would be easier for patients, I think, just knowing, evaluating what options are out there.

And I'll sort of make a quick plug for CCA. During CCA 1.0, eventually what came out of it was this Virtual Care Learning Hub, where we would share all these resources, and I definitely encourage you to check that out.

They have a lot of resources on what kind of vendors are available, and then just other specific articles around telehealth programming. 

The last recommendation I would give is for us having a specific position - a person to handle day-to-day issues. So of course, we have our senior leadership guiding how we do video at Salud, but we have a Video Visits Coordinator position that was originally our Specialty Services Coordinator and we ended up shifting his job description, so that part of his time is spent specific to video visits, and having a point person for everybody to kind of refer back to in the agency was really helpful. And he does a lot of our day-to-day reaching out to patients, trying to flip their phone visits to video visits, coaching our patients how to download Zoom, how to access the link, how to - all sorts of the technical, troubleshooting issues. So, having that one staff point person - really, really valuable for us as we move forward in our video visit journey. 

These are my recommendations.

Wes Gabrillo (CCI):

For more details and to apply for the Connected Care Accelerator: Equity Collaborative, check out the direct link in our show notes, or navigate to the Request for Applications by visiting careinnovations.org. Applications are due by March 16, 2022.

Our thanks again to Dr. Mai Bui-Duy for sharing with us today.

This has been Wes Gabrillo with the Center for Care Innovations - we’ll catch you in the next episode of Health Pilots.