EP274: COVID-19—What Telehealth Means After the Pandemic, With Jonathan Thierman, MD, PhD, From LifeBridge Health System

Everybody’s talking about the surge in telehealth usage. I wanted to talk to someone who has been ramping up their telehealth capabilities for a while to get a sense of what it takes to do it well. And, as has been said by many, doing telehealth isn’t just about technology. It’s about training clinicians, patients, and accounts receivable and other staff. It’s about rearranging workflows and processes. So, I was super pleased to have had the opportunity to speak with Jonathan Thierman, MD, PhD. Dr. Thierman is an ER doctor. He’s also the chief medical information officer for LifeBridge Health systems and medical director of the LifeBridge Health Virtual Hospital.

This show has two parts. This is the second part—episode 274. In this health care podcast, we’ll get into some of the operational aspects of telehealth, like what EHR integration actually means and looks like. We talk about whether laws governing telehealth that were relaxed get stringent again. We talk about natural language processing and artificial intelligence and how they fold into the telehealth answer. I also ask Dr. Thierman for his advice to those potentially more new at the telehealth thing—what lessons he’s learned, what critical success factors might be.

One last point: In episode 273 (and you probably don’t need to listen to these in order), which is the first part of this two-part series, Dr. Thierman and I discuss what telehealth can accomplish, maybe better than a face-to-face patient encounter, and what it’s not so good at. One thing that dawned on me as we were talking is that technology isn’t just a video system. There’s apps, there’s AI, there’s minivans full of lab equipment … there are other innovations that expand the capacity of a remote patient visit. 

You can learn more at lifebridgehealth.org. You can also follow Dr. Thierman on Twitter at @techie_doc or connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Jonathan Thierman, MD, PhD, is physician executive in the LifeBridge Health system and president of the medical staff at Northwest Hospital. He started his career as an engineer and inventor, earning his PhD at MIT and then training in emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins Hospital. In the past, he has worked to bring real-world clinical experience to the engineering and design of medical devices.

Currently, he is the chief medical information officer for the LifeBridge Health system in Baltimore, where he leads a team of physician informaticists to interface between the 180+-person IT department and the 3000+ affiliated physicians across five hospitals and in community practices on matters of the EMR, CPOE, and other health IT systems.

Dr. Thierman is passionate about applying technology to improve health and outcomes. To this end, he helped to establish the LifeBridge Health Virtual Hospital, with affiliated clinical call centers in Jerusalem and the Philippines, to provide telemedicine services across the continuum. He also created the LifeBridge Techbar to offer in-person IS assistance to LifeBridge providers. In addition, he developed a patient “Digital Front Door” to help direct patients to the right care center with the least wait time, improving patient experience and load-balancing the emergency departments and urgent care centers in the LifeBridge Health system.

03:15 The net effect of adopting telemedicine during the pandemic. 06:42 “Data is key.” 09:20 “There’s a lot more communication going on now between health care providers and their patients than there was before.” 09:40 “Even now, we’re still scratching the surface of what insights we can gain from the data.” 12:42 EP251 with Dr. Kimberly Noel and training doctors in webside manner.13:00 How telehealth and EHR systems align. 14:02 The telehealth value points that are coming. 17:23 The necessity of training for clinicians embarking on this telehealth adaptation. 18:50 “Jump in, because it’s … here to stay.” 19:30 “It doesn’t have to be as expensive as you think.”

You can learn more at lifebridgehealth.org. You can also follow Dr. Thierman on Twitter at @techie_doc or connect with him on LinkedIn.