Nursing PhD student published in the Journal of Informatics Nursing

In “The Role of Telehealth and Clinical Informatics in Data Driven Primary Care Redesign,” Brown sought to evaluate the impact of a nurse-led telehealth outreach program and provider telehealth visits on inpatient, outpatient and emergency department utilization over a three-year period that included the COVID-19 pandemic.

Brown found a decrease in inpatient and emergency department utilization after the implementation of telephone outreach to patients via a registered nurse care management company that focused on the complex patient population. The data demonstrated that the combination of continued registered nurse care management outreach during the pandemic, combined with telehealth visits implemented by the practice, kept chronic patients out of the hospital and the emergency department. She also noted that emergency department utilization in the non-chronic patient group rose, with the super-utilizers of the emergency department accounting for a large percentage of those visits. 

"The emergency department findings were particularly important to me,” Brown says. “It demonstrated that, even during the pandemic, frequent non-urgent use of the emergency department may be due to social complexity in patients that is not otherwise being addressed. The low-value, high-cost health care utilization that results from social and behavioral needs is what I plan to address in my dissertation.”

Brown co-authored the article with UB School of Nursing Associate Professor Sharon Hewner, PhD, RN, FAAN. This manuscript was a small part of a five-year HRSA Primary Care Training and Enhancement award for Hewner and Andrew Symons, MD, MS, clinical professor and vice chair for medical student education in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.