When St. Margaret’s Health – Peru closed its hospital, it left a gap in care for thousands of people in the Illinois Valley Region. In fact, residents would now have to drive up to thirty minutes away to access ambulatory and emergency services.  

OSF HealthCare leaders made it their mission to ensure members of this community would have access to the care they need. Their goal was to hire highly skilled providers and staff to reestablish medical services as soon as possible. It sounds simple, but it wasn’t. There were countless steps required to credential providers, obtain regulatory approvals and purchase select St. Margaret’s Health facilities.  

Meanwhile, patients needed to see their providers. As a result, OSF leadership pivoted and enlisted OSF OnCall to provide virtual care to those impacted by the closure. As the digital arm of the health care system, OSF OnCall delivers virtual care and experiences as well as on-demand services to patients throughout Illinois. Leveraging digital health navigators, OSF OnCall helped former St. Margaret’s Health patients schedule in-person appointments with providers or receive care virtually.

“We received less than eight days’ notice that St. Margaret’s Health – Peru was closing,” says Dawn Trompeter, president of OSF HealthCare. “We knew patients were going to be without primary care and OB/GYN services. The first call I made was to OSF OnCall leadership who quickly put together a plan on how OSF OnCall could help fill that gap for those patients.”

In less than a week, the team created a detailed plan, including: education, workflows, scheduling template updates, coordination with OSF Healthcare’s medical group and hospital, credentialing, along with marketing and communication material to employees and new patients. 

One small issue: Providers weren’t credentialed yet, a process that could take up to six months. But that didn’t stop OSF OnCall from planning ahead. The team marketed a single point of entry phone number that St. Margaret’s Health patients could call. A patient could then select whether they needed a virtual or in-person appointment or had general questions.  

It was a whole new workflow for navigators to learn. As part of this effort, they had to enter each patient’s medical information into Epic for the first time. This was an important administrative task to ensure providers had the information they needed once they were credentialed to care for patients.

The biggest volume of calls came from patients in need of medication refills. Navigators were able to quickly adapt to fill the gap for those with providers who hadn’t been credentialed yet. Some providers were able to fill requests from Epic In-Basket messages from patients. If a person had an acute need for medication, navigators scheduled them for virtual care appointments. Even though it was challenging, patients were able to receive their medications without delay.  

In five months, OSF OnCall took more than 14,000 calls and helped patients with medication refills and scheduling virtual or in-person visits. The medical and leadership teams worked together, putting in long hours (and weekend shifts) to make sure that everyone in the Illinois Valley region got the care they needed. 

“It was a significant undertaking in such a short period of time; however, it was worth it,”  Trompeter says. “We created trust by quickly connecting those patients to the care they needed.  We couldn’t have done all of this without such great collaboration with OSF OnCall.”