Houston Methodist turned a new tech hub into a telemedicine school: 66 to 900 providers

Crunchbase News reports that Houston Methodist's Center for Innovation Technology Hub opened on Jan. 30, 2020, as a living laboratory for patient-centered health technology. Josh Sol says leadership had other plans: as COVID-19 ramped up, the team pivoted to creating a training ground where physicians could learn telemedicine.

Sol's team worked with the virtual urgent care team to build training that could be deployed quickly and benefit outpatient groups, some of whom had never used telemedicine. They also trained physicians in telerounding on the hub floor, and later set up an isolation-room iPad link and a telerounding lounge at the Sugar Land hospital.

On March 1, 66 providers were giving virtual care; by March 25 it was 900. Sol said virtual visits grew 1,450% in March and that the shift 'moved the needle about 10 years ahead of its time in four weeks'. The hub also kept prototyping with partners including Amazon, Epic and TytoCare, scaling any project that proved return on investment, satisfaction or efficiency.

Providers giving virtual care rose from 66 on March 1 to 900 by March 25, with a 1,450% increase in virtual visits in March, per Methodist's own figures.

A physical hub existed and could be reassigned to hands-on training at once.

Training was designed for outpatient groups that had never used telemedicine.

Hands-on telerounding practice let physicians learn the tools before using them on patients.

Each hub project had a stated definition of success, so working tools could scale across the system.

An innovation space is most valuable when it can switch in days from experimenting to training the whole organization.

The hub kept working on remote monitoring, real-time locator devices and an ambient listening project, and partnered with TMCx and TytoCare. The figures are the hospital's own, reported by Sol in spring 2020; the article gives no later results.