COVID-19 forced providers to think about the balance between protecting patients from unnecessary exposure while ensuring they could still access needed services.
For UnitedHealth Group’s OptumCare unit, that meant pivoting to providing care in the home as much as possible and scaling up programs previously targeting small groups of patients unable to see docs in person.
One such effort boosted in-home screenings for colon cancer by three times, with 100,000 tests sent to patients’ homes last year under the pandemic, Daniel Frank, M.D., chief medical officer at OptumCare, told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.