Aaron Miri: Post-COVID, virtual care will be about stability, quality of service, and agility.

In this landmark 50^th episode of our podcast, Aaron Miri discusses contact tracing and UT Health’s contribution to prevent the spread of COVID-19 through their public-private partnership with city of Austin, TX. Austin Public Health has partnered with Dell Medical School and UT Health Austin to prevent the spread of COVID-19 by doing contact tracing on behalf of the city of Austin. Besides contact tracing, the University is also using emerging forms of healthcare delivery such as symptom checking, COVID-19 drive-through testing stations, home monitoring, and nurse triage to control the spread of the current pandemic. Currently, the medical school has over 200 contact tracers working remotely and have successfully performed one-third of the contact tracing in the city of Austin. Due to the current COVID situation, healthcare consumers are adopting virtual care technologies that are changing the way healthcare is being delivered today. To ensure smooth delivery of care post-COVID, Aaron discusses how virtual care should be a flawless experience for clinicians and patients. On data interoperability, Aaron suggests three major areas of focus: Identifying and capturing data for public health; the need for the entire continuum of care to be on some sort of a digital system. According to Aaron, healthcare organizations need full data transparency, governance, and internal communication working together to advance interoperability. Take a listen.