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. 2020 Jul 1;27(7):1116-1120.
doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocaa065.

Rapid development of telehealth capabilities within pediatric patient portal infrastructure for COVID-19 care: barriers, solutions, results

Pious D Patel  1 , Jared Cobb  2 , Deidre Wright  2 , Robert W Turer  3   4 , Tiffany Jordan  2 , Amber Humphrey  2 , Adrienne L Kepner  2 , Gaye Smith  2 , S Trent Rosenbloom  1   4
Affiliations

Rapid development of telehealth capabilities within pediatric patient portal infrastructure for COVID-19 care: barriers, solutions, results

Pious D Patel et al. J Am Med Inform Assoc. .

Abstract

The COVID-19 national emergency has led to surging care demand and the need for unprecedented telehealth expansion. Rapid telehealth expansion can be especially complex for pediatric patients. From the experience of a large academic medical center, this report describes a pathway for efficiently increasing capacity of remote pediatric enrollment for telehealth while fulfilling privacy, security, and convenience concerns. The design and implementation of the process took 2 days. Five process requirements were identified: efficient enrollment, remote ability to establish parentage, minimal additional work for application processing, compliance with guidelines for adolescent autonomy, and compliance with institutional privacy and security policies. Weekly enrollment subsequently increased 10-fold for children (age 0-12 years) and 1.2-fold for adolescents (age 13-17 years). Weekly telehealth visits increased 200-fold for children and 90-fold for adolescents. The obstacles and solutions presented in this report can provide guidance to health systems for similar challenges during the COVID-19 response and future disasters.

Keywords: COVID-19; SARS-CoV-2; consumer health informatics; patient portals; policy; telehealth.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Weekly pediatric patient enrollments for My Health at Vanderbilt patient portal from March 1, 2019 until April 12, 2020. Start of new enrollment method was on March 16, 2020. “Children” were defined as age 0–12 years. “Adolescents” were defined as age 13–17 years.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Weekly pediatric patient telehealth visits from May 12, 2019 until April 12, 2020. Start of new enrollment method was on March 16, 2020. “Children” were defined as age 0–12 years. “Adolescents” were defined as age 13–17 years.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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