Increase in Telehealth calls during pandemic an indicator of what’s to come
COVID-19 outbreak has helped fast-track virtual health-care expansion
Ontario’s health-care system is changing.
In a province where more than 82,000 people are on a waiting list for a family physician — with about 7,000 of them in Waterloo Region — COVID-19 has helped fast-track the expansion of virtual health.
And the early numbers have been staggering.
The Ontario Ministry of Health, working with Telehealth Ontario, has been rapidly expanding service capacity in the time of COVID-19. “This is a critical step to help address the increased daily call volumes and reduce call wait times,” said Christian Hasse, spokesperson for the Ministry of Health.
In March, Telehealth averaged a total of 8,400 calls per day.
To put that in perspective, the average daily call volume between January and March of 2019 was 1,750.
In February, the last full month of pandemic-free protocols, Telehealth averaged just 1,600 calls per day.
With more than five times the regular daily call volume, Hasse said it has required reconfiguring internal positions to manage the increase.
“To support enhanced capacity, between March 14 and April 26, 2020, the toll-free Health
Care Connect registration line, operated by Telehealth Ontario, was taken off-line,” said Hasse.
Health Care Connect is a voluntary program for patients and primary care providers and prioritizes patients for referral based on their health need.
“This enabled the redeployment of Health Care Connect intake staff to Telehealth Ontario to respond to the unprecedented number of calls received as Ontario responded to COVID-19,” he said.
In Waterloo Region, Waterloo Wellington Local Health Integration Network CEO Mark Walton said this week “primary care providers have worked hard to ensure access and increased adoption of virtual care.”
Dr. Joe Lee, lead physician with the Centre for Family Medicine in Kitchener, said if you go back 10 to 15 years, the region found itself in a similar predicament where family doctors couldn’t meet the growing population’s needs.
That led to the creation of the Waterloo Regional Campus of the McMaster Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine in 2007, a ploy to get soon-to-be doctors familiar with the area.
“Those initiatives were quite successful in recruiting and retaining physicians in this region,” Lee said. “And it was getting much better until three or four years ago when certain provincial cutbacks and restrictions made new graduates hesitate.”
The graduates themselves are also changing, he said, with a growing demand for more work-life balance and lessened schedules.
The solution, Lee said, is a multilayered approach that will likely require stakeholder and provincial intervention.
But you can also expect the expansion of virtual health to be a major component in any attempt to expand the entry point to the health-care system.
Phone calls, video calls, secure messaging platforms and email have all been utilized in the time of COVID-19.
“Patients and providers have been, by necessity, doing a lot of virtual care,” Lee said.
“There are obviously certain things that can’t be done virtually and require physical visits, so we’re working on transforming primary care into the new normal where there probably will be a blend of virtual care with in-person care.”