Physical distancing has been the only widespread intervention to slow the spread of COVID-19. This has upended the majority of health delivery models. Virtual visits were quickly identified as a key piece of maintaining routine health care in the ambulatory space. In March 2020, after several teams accomplished a large amount of software build and expansion of hardware capacity, UCHealth’s Virtual Health Operations Team partnered with ECHO Colorado to provide virtual education across a health care enterprise comprised of several hundred clinics and twelve hospitals. Educational efforts focused on training providers and staff as a group of super users so there was a deeper understanding of each individual role during implementation. These individuals then served as onsite support, with a command center call line that was available for questions that were not able to be answered by onsite staff. The Virtual Visit training sessions focused on visit scheduling, patient check in, provider and patient connecting in the virtual space, documentation, billing and virtual visit best practices.

A total of 125 sessions were provided over a two week training period, which were attended by more than 1,600 trainees. Subsequently, the number of virtual home visits between patient and provider went from averaging 25 visits per day to over 3,600 per day in April 2020.

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Victoria Myers, one of ECHO Colorado’s program coordinators, will speak at the Telehealth20 Value-Based Care Summit this June in Austin, TX. Myers talk, entitled “Using a Project ECHO Platform to Improve Caregiver Education,” will focus on how ECHO programs have helped improve care provider training and competency across Colorado and the country. The session will feature experts from three different programs who will share their experience developing and managing ECHO platforms. Myers will discuss how to set up the platform, identify goals, recruit participants and overcome barriers to create a valuable resource.

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