By: Brian Yarnell, President and Co-Founder Bluestream Health
A Quick Recap
One week ago, Bluestream launched a free, HIPAA-compliant virtual care solution to help care providers work with patients that are impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak. Our offer was simple- start using it instantly to see patients, no strings attached.
In parallel, our team and teams at our customers and partners have been working tirelessly to deploy large-scale teletriage solutions to engage with patients at massive scale across large geographic areas.
Is it Making an Impact?
In a word, yes. We have been blown-away by the response to our free offering, both in terms of the rapid adoption and gratitude expressed by hard-working care providers that have used it to positively impact patients’ lives.
On the health system front, we have helped organizations, from small multi-provider practices to large multi-state healthcare organizations, virtually deploy clinical resources to keep care providers safe and evaluate patients with incredible speed and scale. Together, small and large organizations are fighting the battle against COVID-19 with teletriage in emergency rooms, hospital floors and clinics, and are gearing up to move the battle lines out of hospital and into the community.
Some Specific Examples
Rapid Response, our free offering
Since we launched Rapid Response less than seven days ago, we have seen more than 2,000 organizations sign up with over 150 new ones each day. As of today, we are averaging more than 2,500 free virtual sessions and 11,000 minutes per day and that number is growing fast! Please continue to help us get the word out about our free offering which is making a real impact.
Enterprise Level Teletriage
The Bluestream team is working with large health systems to implement virtual care and triage solutions aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19. Specifically, our enterprise partners are focused on:
- A) limiting exposure of mission-critical healthcare providers to infected patients, and
- B) treating as many patients as possible through rapid virtual consults.
Key healthcare providers like Emergency Medicine and Infectious Disease specialists are in bunkers, while front-line workers intercept patients in rapid succession across every point of care. Bluestream’s intelligent queuing tools and one-click invite links for patients at home deliver virtual consults with extreme efficiency.
MedStar Health, the largest healthcare provider in Maryland and the Washington, D.C. region, has deployed Bluestream Health across more than 25 points of care for on-demand, remote access to emergency medicine physicians, physician assistants and other clinical specialists.
MedStar Health is averaging more than 5,000 Bluestream sessions per month and delivering an astonishing sub-60-second wait time for patients to virtually see a highly-qualified care provider.
“We have worked with Bluestream for more than a year to deploy a telehealth system that is extraordinarily scalable and flexible, with the goal of giving our clinical teams the ability to rapidly adapt and respond to care delivery needs virtually. In the face of the COVID-19 crisis, this hard work to advance MedStar Health’s telehealth capabilities has enabled our system to respond with speed, scale and flexibility.” Bill Sheahan, Vice President of Telehealth at MedStar Health.
Fighting A Long-Term War, Not Just Today’s Battle
Bluestream users have delivered more than one thousand hours of consults in the past seven days! This is not Facetime, Skype, Zoom, or video conferencing—this is clinical workflow delivery, focused on getting the right care provider “in front” of the right patient immediately. Our patented Provisioning Engine uses in-memory analytics to manage these complex workflows at scale without human intervention. The Bluestream platform was built from day one to scale quickly and cost-effectively.
In light of the COVID-19 outbreak, we have already scaled up our infrastructure by a factor of 20X. Legacy systems like old-school video conferencing are buckling under the weight of the increased demand for virtual consults. We have not, and we will not. Virtualized care sessions will quickly become standard operating practice for healthcare organizations, regardless of whether COVD-19 is defeated sooner or later.
Some additional resources
Please visit the resources section of our website for guidance from our Chief Medical Officer, Sandeep Pulim, MD.