mHealth

Several weeks ago I was presented with a CT scan on a new patient, a young woman with a severe headache who had been transferred overnight by air ambulance from another hospital. As a center that specializes in diseases of the nervous system, my facility, the Barrow Neurological Institute (BNI), routinely accepts people from around the country. And since this woman had been sent to us because the CT scan from the outside facility was interpreted as her possibly having blood in the brain, no further questions were asked. Sounds like responsible and compassionate healthcare, right? But there was a hitch: The patient didn't need to be transferred at all.

We all know telemedicine brings huge benefits to patient care - from improving care accessibility to reducing medication noncompliance and hospital readmissions.

But telemedicine can also be a path to better practice profitability. Adding telemedicine services to your practice can actually drive up your revenue.

To respond to the growing need for intensivist support among many facilities in the mountain west, a new service has been created within the University of Utah Health Care's extensive Telehealth System. When a regional hospital lacks intensivist coverage, their primary ICU attending is out sick, the local pulmonologist goes on vacation, or an expanding community ICU service finds itself short-handed, the University of Utah’s TeleICU program is here to help.

The TeleICU program has been implemented for just over a year, with many success stories. Many patients who otherwise may have been transferred to a tertiary center have been able to stay in their community hospitals, near family and support systems, while providing revenue for the local hospital. This virtual intensivist coverage allows our affiliate facilities to function at the top of their skill set, and patients that do require transfer to a larger center can be more rapidly identified.

In addition to teaching students reading, writing and the basics of arithmetic, parents expect that school faculty and staff will keep their children safe throughout the day. That’s why the staff of your child’s elementary school includes a nurse as well as educators. But while most schools have a clinic onsite, nursing staff in educational institutions tend to be restricted in the services they’re able to provide, simply due to a lack of effective clinical technology or access to specialty healthcare providers.

Telemedicine may be on board to change all that. Between providing nurses access to other healthcare professionals via remote conferencing and letting school healthcare staff monitor students remotely when necessary, school administrators are ready to give telemedicine an A.

When it comes to telemedicine, navigating the reimbursement process can be tricky. What rules do you need to follow to ensure you get paid? How do you know your patients are eligible for telemedicine? How does the billing process actually work?

We get these questions all the time at eVisit. While the answers vary a bit depending on which payer you’re talking about, it’s usually easiest to start with Medicare.

Tweeter, Twitter, Blog, Bling, LinkedIn, Linkin Park, Facebook, Facetime. Are you part of the social media generation? Do you know the difference between a tweet and a twerk or are you still trying to figure out how chillax made it into Meriam and Webster? Social media options abound but offer to some a rather confusing array of choices. Which one do I join to find my telemedicine colleagues? Where can I get in on the best "conversations" (yes in quotes!) about what’s hot in mHealth? How on earth do social media intersect with telemedicine and is it really something that could benefit me and my program?