This year has caused many unpredictable changes to occur, and the changing environment at skilled nursing facilities has been no exception. As noted by Skilled Nursing News, the Coronavirus completely changed the way SNFs interacted with third parties – in many cases, existing supplier and provider partnerships evaporated overnight when lockdowns began.1
And so, many SNFs will be in the process of evaluating their operations to ensure their policies and procedures are flexible to meet ongoing changes within the healthcare landscape. This may include implementing telemedicine to ensure continuity of care and/or it may be deploying specialized SNF therapy software2 to streamline documentation, billing and reporting requirements.
In response to COVID-19, many healthcare organizations, such as SNFs, have been faced with launching telemedicine initiatives rapidly with little to no IT infrastructure in place. Bloomberg Law accurately describes the shift as “building the plane while flying it.”3 In addition to the sudden challenge of developing tech-forward practices that meet patients’ physical needs, SNFs will want to continue delivering top-tier “in-flight service” while safely landing this new process plane as COVID-19 restrictions evolve.
As a result, along with rolling out communicative and collaborative technologies at scale, SNFs will want to make sure that they deploy back-end solutions that help streamline new practices. These solutions ensure that key patient data is both leveraged in the moment to provide accurate care and handled securely to drive long-term practice priorities as SNFs move toward hybrid service delivery models.
References:
1Skilled Nursing News, “Vendors, Rehab Companies Adjust to Nursing Homes’ New Normal Under COVID,” July 7, 2020
2Optima Therapy for SNFs Overview
3Bloomberg Law, “Building the Plane While Flying It: The Challenges of Telehealth,” July 14, 2020
