Healthcare in the Age of COVID-19: A Midwestern Catholic Health System's Innovative and Technology-Forward Approach to Life-Saving Care.

After the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was declared a pandemic in mid-March, it challenged healthcare systems to provide care while mitigating the risk to both patients and staff. The high transmissibility of the virus combined with PPE shortages made this an even more difficult task. A Catholic health system in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, embraced healthcare technology in order to bridge the gap between providing patient care, exposure to the virus, and lack of PPE. To treat COVID-19 patients, they developed a COVID clinic that provides triage, testing, and a hospital-at-home service. The service uses Health Recovery Solution devices to monitor more symptomatic or high-risk patients and provide real-time health data to physicians at a remote site, keeping stable COVID patients out of the hospital while still providing quality care. They also embraced telemedicine across all primary care and subspecialties, increasing the use of the AveraNow platform from less than 50 virtual visits per day to more than 1,000 per day. In long term care, the organization implemented multiple forms of healthcare technology, including TYTO Care devices, the Polycom RealPresence device, and doxy.me services to continue to provide care to these extremely high-risk patients. In the arguably most at-risk environment, the emergency department, the health system was able to use their eCARE emergency video call system to reduce the amount of staff exposed to COVID patients and allow physicians to minimize their exposure while still being able to communicate with patients and perform necessary procedures. Hopefully health systems that have yet to embrace telemedicine or other forms of healthcare technology can use this organization's model to implement changes, especially in the face of uncertainty regarding whether coronavirus will peak again, and whether that peak will be even higher than the surge already seen throughout the U.S.