Conference Preview: The Role of Registration in Telehealth Services: It All Begins with Registration

Session Title: The Role of Registration in Telehealth Services:  It All Begins with Registration

Presenter: Brenda Sauer

Learning Lab: Series 1

Date/Time: May 4, 10:45 a.m.

About the Learning Lab

Telehealth services are increasing rapidly in many healthcare settings including Urgent Care and Emergency Departments. Patients continue to use the emergency department for care despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Emergency department volumes continue to grow year after year. Because a better solution was needed to manage patients in a busy emergency department, our healthcare system chose telehealth services. Why have telehealth services in a busy metropolitan teaching hospital? To improve patient throughput and patient satisfaction. These are the two main goals for any busy emergency room and the two main reasons we started this program at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

In this Learning Lab, you will learn about the two Telehealth programs at New York Presbyterian Hospital and the challenges we needed to overcome to have successful programs. These challenges included communication and working as a team with all team members in the emergency department, including physicians, nurses, information technology personnel and registration.

In this learning lab, you will learn how physicians and registrars learned to work together to overcome the communication, technical, and operational issues associated with starting a telehealth program. Losing or forgetting a patient in a virtual waiting room was only one of the challenges the group faced! Another challenge was teaching physicians how to manage or fix the camera so they can see their patient.

Teamwork, communication and respect between all of the parties were essential in making this program successful. As our Physician–in-Chief, Dr. Rahul Sharma, states, “One of the most critical members of the healthcare team is the registrar. Treatment cannot begin until the patient is registered.” That success was shown in our patient satisfaction scores. We will explore our results and what our patients are saying about this new service.

I hope you join me at my presentation as we not only talk about telehealth services, but also about building relationships between registration and the clinical staff.