COVID-19's impact on our organizations and our profession

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a massive impact on health care around the globe and in the U.S. in particular. Health insurers expect a tsunami of pent-up demand once the COVID-19 waves have passed, hospitals are reeling from the combined impact of falling off a revenue cliff when elective procedures stopped and from the high cost of managing COVID-19 disease.

Health information management departments are addressing a number of complications from the pandemic:

• Rapid introduction and adoption of new COVID-19 codes
• Dramatic increase in telemedicine
• Changes in how providers document in the hospital due to the risk of infection from using common keyboards
• Changes in how providers document in ambulatory settings due to the shift to telemedicine

I had a chance to speak with Katherine Lusk (Chief Health Information Management and Exchange Officer for Children’s Hospital of Dallas, TX as well as AHIMA’s President Chair Elect 2020) and Garri Garrison (Vice President of 3M Health Information Systems for the U.S. and Canada) describe the impact of COVID-19 on health care in the U.S. 

In our session, they described the rapid adoption and scaling up of telemedicine to meet ambulatory care needs, maximizing the use of technologies that use portals to enable hands-free registration and helping providers adopt technologies that enable voice driven documentation.

Come and listen to these two experts shed light on the impact of COVID-19 on health care in the U.S.

L. Gordon Moore, MD, is senior medical director, Clinical Strategy and Value-based Care for 3M Health Information Systems.