Reference no: EM133254903

You are the executive director of Smithville Regional Hospital.  Since COVID-19, your hospital has implemented telemedicine to serve patients. How has it gone? What kinds of assessment is required after an initiative like this? In addition to keeping staff and patients safe, there is evidence that this delivery method can lessen other problems the hospital is having in these areas (to name a few): patients unable to return to the hospital for follow up visits after procedures (leading to high rate of re-admittance), an overcrowded ER, and poor satisfaction surveys-and costs associated with these. Some practitioners were reluctant to adopt thisplatform and would prefer to continue seeing patients face-to-face only for follow up visits. Your job is to communicate to various parties (see below) using different business communication vehicles. The CEO is counting on you to oversee a continued smooth rollout of this new protocol with training, implementation, upgrades, assessment and cost reduction.

You can add any details you wish about your hospital in order to complete these assignments. Think about these kinds of things: size, location (rural or urban), strategic goals, problems, costs caused by patients not attending follow-up visits, rates of re-admittance, specialty of physicians (if notable), as a way to assist patients who cannot access the hospital. There is also the consideration of a COVID-19 resurgence and what needs to be in place. You may also add details of the success that local, benchmark hospitals are having with this new system. Do people in your area have computers and smartphones (you could make up a local census). Did this impact use of telemedicine in the past year? Other considerations might be what kind of coverage do patients who use this system have with private insurance or even Medicare and Medicaid, what kinds of technology or upgrades might be required?  There is growing use of mental health professionals' and telemedicine. What will this entail?

It will also be really important to provide data to your readers here. You can find sources that give you a general perhaps national average for hospitals your size, but you will also have to fabricate some data as if you are in a real-life situation-but it should be based on fact. You will document research in your report about real the effects that telemedicine is having nationally on problems just like those that Smithville is experiencing.  

How would you make a report to be shared with the CEO and other hospital administrators and stakeholders. It is very important to consider User-Centered Design with this report. These are not necessarily peers of yours. They want concise information and would ask questions if this were a real-life situation. The research is provided throughsupporting sources on the assessment of your telemedicine system for patients and hospitals, being careful to show that you understand both pros and cons and the way forward. The report should include reasons for adoption and how the new system is going and continued assessment. You will have to fabricate data (based on fact) from Smithville Hospital on the reasons for adopting telemedicine. The research report has five sections: Executive Summary (or Summary), Background, Solution, Recommendations, Conclusion (plus  References listing your sources).

It should be a Summary, Background, References. What is the research on how telemedicine is being used (national and local benchmarks)? How has it gone at Smithville? Who is trained; who is left to train?  Was it successful in improving patient satisfaction and in cost-savings? How does it, benefit practitioners? What is the next step, your recommendations going forward?

This part of the report is due first so that you may use my comments to edit when handing in the entire report.

Tip: Don't spend time on the history of telemedicine. They already know what it is. What they will want is a brief  summary of where youwere in terms of services when COVID-19 hit. What was quickly put in place, the results and plans going forward. It is possible with this audience that they will read only the summary. It needs to hit all of the highlights of the rest of the report. What do you want them to know if this is all that they read? Data speaks to this reader/audience. Costs, patient numbers, etc. You can back these up with national or local trends at benchmark institutions, but what happened at Smithville. Vital to include this. Summary should include all details in brief. Think of it this way: if someone read only the summary (which is a realistic possibility) could they get the essence of the entire project. Could it stand alone?