Telemedicine programs in rural and community hospitals are improving access and outcomes for patients while augmenting and supporting providers with expert resources. These were the main themes at a panel discussion sponsored by Access TeleCare at Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting.
The session featured:
- Chris Gallagher, MD, founder and chief strategy officer, Access TeleCare
- Aaron Hajart, chief executive officer, Community Medical Center (RWJBarnabas Health) (Tom’s River, N.J.)
- Gian Varbaro, MD, chief medical officer and vice president, ambulatory services, Bergen New Bridge Medical Center (Paramus, N.J.)
Here were four key takeaways from the session:
1. Hospitals are adopting telemedicine to support diverse care needs
Bergen New Bridge Medical Center started its telemedicine journey pre-pandemic to address post-discharge care gaps, expanded telemedicine during Covid and now offers telemedicine visits for patients who have difficulty getting their in-person. “It’s much easier to see patients for one in-person visit and then supplement that with frequent telemed visits,” Dr. Varbaro said.
Community Medical Center, about 35 minutes from the nearest trauma center, adopted telemedicine to support emergency stroke care. “Tele-stroke has been an amazing tool to improve our door-to-needle time,” Mr. Hajart said. CMC has also leveraged telemedicine to reduce heart failure readmissions, decreasing readmissions from 26% to 12.5%.
2. Telemedicine can augment existing specialists
For many community hospitals, their problem is not having enough specialists in certain specialties. Neurology is an example. Hospital leaders have told Dr. Gallagher, “We have enough neuro hospitalists, but not enough neurologists to cover emergent care.” Thus, a rationale for telemedicine at community and rural hospitals is augmenting the capacity of their current specialists, especially in emergency situations.
3. Telemedicine improves both the patient and clinician experience
For patients, the obvious benefit of telemedicine is convenience, since a visit is as simple as a Zoom call.
For nurses working a hospital night shift, having a telemedicine service they can easily access can improve peace of mind, since in an emergency, they have an expert resource readily available.
Also, access to neurologists through a tele-stroke program can help hospitals in recruiting neurologists, which is one of the hardest specialties to recruit. “The most stressful part of a neurologist’s job is having to quickly answer stroke calls,” Dr. Varbaro said. A tele-stroke program eases the burden on staff neurologists and makes the job more attractive.
4. Physician buy-in is critical for telemedicine success
While the benefits of telemedicine are compelling, having staff buy-in is essential. However, buy-in is not a given, because some physicians still view in-person care as superior and may not be aware of the many use cases and capabilities where telemedicine provides significant value for patients and providers.
“It’s a matter of figuring out where we have needs but also where we can get physicians to go along,” Dr. Varbaro said. Involving telemedicine physician groups within normal clinical processes can help normalize the concept and increase buy-in among skeptics.
“If you try to launch before there’s buy-in, it will be difficult to be successful,” Dr. Gallagher said. “There needs to be a crawl, walk, run approach to rolling telemedicine programs out.”
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