It’s hard to describe the profound impact COVID-19 has had on the American healthcare system in the past month. While March has proven to be a stand out month for telemedicine and virtual care in America, it has also shown inadequacies and gaps in our healthcare system which providers have been forced to tackle head on. Despite these challenges, we’ve seen our health system partners manage increasingly disruptive patient volumes with unbelievable efficiency and innovation.
In the first 11 days of the COVID-19 pandemic taking off in the United States, we saw a 3,600% increase in utilization across our platform.
Our health system partners immediately ramped up to meet increasing COVID-19 patient volumes. One health system partner offered training to 600 new clinicians on the Zipnosis platform in under an hour. Those 600 clinicians had the opportunity to add (3 minutes/ visit X 600 clinicians x 10 hours) 120,000 visits per day.
Throughout the entire month of March, we had a total of 412,553 visits–compared to 37,170 in February. Surging as high as 36,000 visits in one day.
In an effort to keep patients out of clinics and support social distancing, we quickly removed previous referral criteria for in-person care. This also meant we were able to make virtual care accessible to even more patients, regardless of age or underlying health conditions.
Despite the added patient volume–we kept up. We had a median clinical work time of under three minutes in the month of March across all modes of care during a time with dramatically increased utilization.
Of those total visits, 88.2% were asynchronous adaptive interviews, 3.4% chat, 4.5% phone, and 3.9% video.
In March, we screened a total of 192,915 patients for COVID-19.
We designed an 11-question COVID-19 screener which, thanks to our rapid response virtual care technology, kept pace with the evolving CDC and local guidelines.
In the end, we saw providers tackling astronomical patient volumes with incredible efficiency, reduced face-to-face contact with at-risk patients, and high risk patients treated safely outside of clinics.
In the month of March alone, we saved providers over 103,139 hours of clinical work time compared to the time it takes to complete a traditional video visit.
