How Workpath is powering in-home healthcare
By: Anthony Jones
Workpath, the only dispatch platform for mobile healthcare services, is helping immunocompromised and vulnerable populations receive their regular medical care in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Workpath platform facilitates modern-day house calls — allowing healthcare providers to schedule or dispatch on-demand the right professional to perform the right type of care wherever it’s needed. Typically, their platform enables healthcare organizations to deliver care like bloodwork, post-acute nursing visits, and diagnostics imagery. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, Workpath is seeing a surge of demand for routine care and testing.
We sat down with Hunter Pechin of WorkPath to understand how they built their platform and how the demands for their tools are changing over the course of this health crisis.
Can you give us a general overview of Workpath? How does your platform work?
Our tools allow healthcare teams to provide care before, during, and after the visit. Before a job, our ordering portal allows patients to request appointments and fill a provider’s queue. Then our intelligent lead assignments match the right tech for a job.
Once a tech accepts a job, everything is done within our Workpath mobile app. We help providers plan multi-stop jobs and automatically route to additional stops as they’re added. Within the Workpath mobile app, a tech can accept the job, get a secure prep-list for their appointment, and use in-app navigation to get to the patient on time. Along the way, automatic and proactive notifications alert both the patient and the provider of the tech’s status. And with Mapbox tools, techs can do all this without ever having to exit the application.
How has your demand changed with the spread of COVID-19? What is your team doing to respond?
Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a huge surge in demand — since the first case of COVID-19 in the US was confirmed in January Workpath’s appointment volume has surged 94%. This surge tends to fall across two categories — COVID-19 diagnostic testing and in-home care for vulnerable patients.
With diagnostic testing, as is clear from the news, it’s a bit of a Wild West as different companies scramble to meet demands. We’ve received increased inquiries from both current customers and new leads looking to collaborate on the delivery and potential in-home administration of COVID-19 diagnostic kits. Most of this is in the early stage, as any kits would have to be approved first.
What’s been the biggest change is how COVID-19 has impacted every other part of the healthcare system. Those most vulnerable to this virus — elderly, cancer patients, those with underlying health conditions — are the same group who rely on routine medical care and in-office visits. However, with COVID-19, even a trip to their regular doctor could put them at risk.
Instead, we’re seeing healthcare providers accelerating and training their staff to provide in-home care to mitigate that risk. They’re turning to our team to help meet the demand and orchestrate the logistics without disrupting their patients’ care. While our platform is available across the US, we’re seeing most of this request coming from cities across California, Washington, and New York, who’ve been hardest hit by this pandemic.
How do you think this will change the roadmap of Workpath or the industry you’re in?
What’s important to know is we’ve been offering many of these services even before it became vital, and are prepared for this surge. We think that one of the effects of COVID-19 will be that the trends of telemedicine combined with in-home care will become the new normal and we believe this crisis will accelerate a shift to a more patient-centric future.
To learn more about Workpath and follow how they’re responding to the pandemic, visit their website. If you’re building in response to the needs of this crisis reach out to our Community team to see how we can help.
Anthony Jones - Enterprise Territory Executive - Southeast Region - Mapbox | LinkedIn
Delivering care whenever and wherever it’s needed was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.