COVID-19

HIP Investigator, Dr. Yao Liu assisted in the development of the Telehealth Resources for Eye Care During COVID-19, a Resource from the Ocular Telehealth Special Interest Group (SIG). The document consists of resources that can assist eye care providers in the rapid transition to telehealth for providing necessary eye care while reducing risks to patients and communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. The resource document includes sections on AAO resources on billing/coding, checking vision, innovative strategies, audio telehealth, video telehealth, and documentation.

With the onset of COVID-19, primary care systems across the country are rapidly changing clinical operations to limit in-person ambulatory visits for infection-control reasons. The Primary care Academics Transforming Healthcare (PATH) collaborative quickly redesigned primary care in their institution to introduce telemedicine visits as a practical alternative to provide needed care remotely. The innovation was the rapid development and implementation of workflows to standardize billable telemedicine visits in the primary care setting.

With the onset of COVID-19, the Health Innovation Program (HIP) determined they could use the reporting infrastructure they have been developing over the last several years, in partnership with Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), to rapidly produce reports with reliable and accurate data for health systems who are WCHQ members. These reports can help the health systems to prepare for and respond to this pandemic.

The reports provide details on primary care provider panels, clinics, and ZIP codes for each health system and helps the health system to identify the numbers and prevalence of people who are at risk for severe complications from COVID-19.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, UW-Madison researchers within the School of Medicine and Public Health are quickly adapting to support Wisconsin health officials. Researchers at the Health Innovation Program (HIP), who have been working to improve health care using electronic health record data voluntarily provided by over 20 Wisconsin health systems through the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), have mobilized to determine how they could rapidly use these data to help those on the front line of the battle against COVID-19 to support the direction of efforts towards the places in Wisconsin that need it most.

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, critically ill patients have been hospitalized and isolated from their families and loved ones. In many hospitals, the palliative care team has been charged with maintaining communication between the critical care team and their patients’ families. Dr. Gretchen Schwarze and her team along with Dr. Toby Campbell created the Best Case/Worst Case: ICU (COVID-19) communication toolkit to assist separated families and to help them develop an understanding of their loved one’s illness, prognostic awareness and the range of possible outcomes.