WCCO Radio reports…

When the COVID-19 pandemic took center state in Minnesota in March 2020, hospitals and clinics rushed to alter how they offered clinic visits due to worries about patient and provider safety.

Video visits quickly replaced traditional in-person clinic visits at HealthPartners locations in Minnesota. In fact, video visits reached their peak last May accounting for 50 percent of all visits.

“We were able to train 2,000 clinicians on how to do video visits and create training materials in the matter of days,” said Dr. Annie Ideker, a family physician at the HealthPartners clinic in Arden Hills. “Literally in one day a small team of us actually developed this strategy and completed five video visits by the end of the day. That was on March 19.”

As of February 15, HealthPartners had completed over 1 million video visits since the start of the pandemic.

While the numbers have dropped off, 22 percent of all visits at HealthPartners are done via video.