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ARK Behavioral Health has a number of resources on: The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health and substance use. List of mental health and addiction resources. Frequently asked questions (FAQ) about telehealth. Caring for a loved one who is struggling.

Consider your balance between remote and face to face care – have you got it right and how might it need to change in the months to come? Think about how you are going to manage respiratory symptoms over the winter and be aware of the issues with COVID-19 in children and what to do if resuscitation is needed.Shielding is paused and is unlikely to return in the same form as at the start of the pandemic.Know about the standard operating procedure (SOP) for primary care Appraisal is restarting in a very light-touch way and there are other changes to administration.Continue to wear PPE when seeing patients face to face, and continue planning for a much bigger flu vaccination season than usual. Death certification requirements are relaxed for as long as the Coronavirus Act is in force.Look after yourself and your staff.Continue to plan ahead; this will be a marathon, not a sprint.Your core clinical skills are still important.

I had been trying to get my Mom to do video calls on her computer for a decade. Pushback and inexperience with new technologies just didn’t give her the confidence she needed to step over that line. A lack of trust in the systems to work right and in her ability to navigate the hiccups minimised her willingness to give it a shot. And then along came covid. Due to necessity and front-line assistance (my sister and niece get a hat tip here), Mom finally began to see how beneficial the tools were for improving her state of mind and increasing our awareness of how she is from a long distance during the lockdown. There also has been hesitancy in healthcare to fully embrace communication technologies that can optimise and energise processes. Uncertainty and optimism are certainly warranted in the use of electronic mobile connections in healthcare and the devices that support it. These new approaches touch facets of training, appointments, personal health monitoring and overall system reliability. Beyond the changes necessitated by the pandemic, the need to embrace new technologies in healthcare is now essential and will be for the future despite expected challenges to universal adoption. The covid pandemic has motivated healthcare to broaden its vision of the potential for remote technologies. Now telemedicine, telehealth, telecoaching, digital therapeutics and mobile patient outreach has become absolutely necessary. They are here to stay. Changes in reimbursement policies have provided coverage for telehealth services that, before the pandemic, was much more restrictive. While patients and physicians may appreciate the convenience of this “new normal”, there are quandaries associated with its uptake. At a time when relationships are so vital to our lives, having technology to either build them (granted in a new way), inform them (via a new set of communication tools) or damage them (dependent on the willingness, system robustness and comfort of the individuals involved) is worth considering. For example, worries about diagnostic accuracy, limitations of the virtual physical exam, concerns about privacy, usability and the loss of the person-focus of patient/physician communication. The effectiveness of telemedicine and telehealth is also impacted by health literacy, access to reliable networks and patient comfort with using digital tools. Physicians and care organisations have to be creative and rely on partnerships and local resources, such as school district hot spots or public library broadband access, to make the system reliably work for all their patients. On another level, Dissent Magazine discusses a range of economic concerns stemming from the accelerated adoption of telehealth, including the primary worry that services have the potential to be structured as profit centres shifting the focus of decisions toward stakeholder and executive compensation rather than effective care. Then there are questions surrounding the apps and tools patients are using to make decisions about their health. Dr. Google has known weaknesses. Patient-facing diagnostic apps, wearables and symptom trackers, while showing promise still require appropriate risk evaluation before patients should fully trust them to track and manage their health without clinician guidance, and protect against worry and overuse of health services. The Skeptical Cardiologist shares reasons to resist the temptation to rely on, for example, the blood oxygen monitoring accuracy of a much anticipated product for reasons that include lack of reference to primary data and cost. Use of symptom trackers could proliferate as patients remain hesitant to visit physicians due to covid concerns. One project from Georgetown University was forthcoming about its rapid development strategy when sharing the results of a covid symptom tracker pilot test. Areas covered included size of the beta test (48 students), use of unique identifiers to address privacy concerns for both patients and organisations involved, access to condition-relevant patient-centered educational information and instructions to seek medical care should symptoms indicate that necessary step. It is this sort of transparency that aids the healthcare community and patients to appropriately select and trust tools to manage symptoms and situations for public and personal health safety. Voice activation technologies, so convenient for getting the latest news and listening to music, are seen as having great potential in healthcare monitoring as well. Voice characteristics are being explored as a diagnostic indicator. As covered recently in Nature, vocal biomarkers can track mental status, pulmonary function and coronary distress. But a myriad of factors could affect verbal characteristics reducing voice as a reliable mechanism for diagnosis. While promising, teasing out these differences in vocal diagnostics is still an emerging opportunity being explored in the US and around the world. Also, the use of voice-activated technologies in certain care settings can impact the privacy of the patient and may therefore not be suitable. On a systemic scale, the growing dependance on technologies leave patients, clinicians and organisations vulnerable to purposeful or accidental incidents or outtages, such as cyberattacks, that create disruptions and compromise patient safety. Recently a large health system in the US was crippled due to a ransomware attack. Patients needed to be rapidly moved to another out of system facility to ensure their safety. Experts caution that this is not the last of these situations and advise systems to train their staff and create awareness to recognise the early signals of a cyberattack to quickly reduce the extent of the damage and corresponding interruptions to healthcare services. Mom is now expanding her use of technology to make life better. She is exploring her first streaming service and becoming comfortable with its capabilities to binge on popular programmes. Who knows if that will lead the way to virtual visits with her cardiologist, or being able to track her vital signs from across the country and her personal use of a smart watch to monitor her heart? Let’s hope for all moms and other patients the adoption of technologies in the health space can be folded into our daily lives with minimal harm and negative disruption.

This webinar will be of interest to: anyone currently working in a nursing/allied health professionals (AHP) clinical informatics role those who aspire to develop their career in this area those who are seeking to set up such a role within their organisation those currently working with CNIOs/AHP informatics leads. Attendees will learn: more about how CNIO/AHP informatics roles are currently set up in the NHS – time commitment, reporting structures etc what the profile is of those holding such roles about possible challenges in connections between CNIOs/AHPs in informatics roles and CCIOs and CIOs thoughts on whether the CNIO/AHP informatics role should be formally recognised further views from senior leaders on the future of these roles.

What will I learn? What is telehealth? How could telehealth help me? What is telecare? How could telecare help me? How to get telecare products and services What do I need to consider when buying telecare products? What should I do next?

This page by the Academic Health Science Network includes a case study and a video demonstrating the triage in action