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Many hospitals that have relied solely on their brick and mortar facilities are now realizing that their physical location is only a part of the health care arsenal they can wield. While hospital facilities are valuable, rare and difficult to reproduce, they often limit their accessibility to those that are geographically local and sufficiently mobile to take advantage of an in-person visit. Beyond the physical structure, the most valuable asset that the hospital employs are its expert physicians. With the appropriate digital infrastructure, their expertise can be deployed well beyond the four walls of the facility.

In the post-COVID-19 world, most hospitals will be scrambling to reclaim the revenue they missed during the pandemic. Certainly, a good portion of normal operational revenue will revive as patients become more comfortable returning to the hospital for non-emergency conditions and delayed procedures. But making up for the losses arising during the pandemic will be a daunting task.

Second opinions are becoming an important component for patient healthcare. A recent study by the Mayo Clinic identified that as many as 88 percent of second opinions either differ to refine the original patient diagnosis [1]. This occurs more often than not when the physician rendering the second opinion has specialized expertise in the field in question and has the benefit of careful review of the patient’s prior complete set of clinical data.

Hi, my name is Kai Rivera, and I am the Project & Implementation Specialist at Purview.

Over the past month we have shared with you the free of charge services and products Purview is offering to help during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our goal is electronic Access, Collaboration and Sharing of medical records wherever necessary for any person or organization who may need it.

Now, we want to again highlight a few organizations who have taken us up on this offer, in order to continue to provide care to their communities: 

Hospitals and subspecialists are being called on, now more than ever, to provide their expertise to patients without an in -person face-to-face visit.  With the need for social distancing and stay at home orders, patients seeking second opinions are looking for the best medical expertise they can get without having to stray too far from home.

For patients in more rural areas or for more complex and critical cases, sometimes urban or even regional centers are where that expertise is more likely located. Traveling, sometimes long distances, to one of these facilities without first knowing whether they are ready and capable of treating that condition is often not advised. Instead, patients would prefer to communicate their case information in advance and only travel if the facility expects the visit to be advisable.

Hospitals seeking to expand their reach and perhaps even to increase revenue are heeding the call.  But to do so requires a solution that captures patients' clinical information, performs video consults and enables them to communicate with the patient, his or her referring physician and other health care experts both within ad outside of their own facility. Choosing which to use is a challenge.

Hospitals need to choose whether to acquire their own software to expose their unique expertise and brand to a larger audience or become a recipient for a third party network of specialists that refer cases to the hospital.  The decision usually comes down to whether the hospital wants to control its own process and outsource the administration of these cases or whether this service will be part of the hospitals core offering.

Below are some of the considerations for which approach to select.