Intermountain’s New Virtual Care Initiative Helps Salt Lake City Patients Stay Local
Salt Lake City's Intermountain Healthcare is one of the nation’s largest virtual hospital services.
Intermountain Healthcare is bringing together 35 telehealth programs and more than 500 caregivers to enable patients to receive remote medical care. “The virtual hospital, called Intermountain Connect Care Pro, provides basic medical care as well as advanced services, such as stroke evaluation, mental health counseling, intensive care, and newborn critical care.” Although it doesn’t take the place of on-site caregivers, it does supplement existing staff, and provides specialized services in rural communities where some types of medical care aren’t easily available.Intermountain’s chief of clinical and outreach services, Michael Phillips, M.D., says that the health system went in this “virtual” direction “because its leaders saw the evolving healthcare landscape and wanted to get out in front of it. ‘Our thought process behind this was that the world has changed from the days where you can only take care of people who [physically] make it to you. But literally every person on the planet is pretty much within the distance of a cell tower now. So we feel people should be able to benefit from [remote] care,’ says Phillips.”
In circumstances when a helicopter would normally transport a patient from a rural facility, many cases can be treated locally with virtual care. Being treated locally can often be better for the patient and their family.
Intermountain’s virtual care services cover more than 30 ICUs and provide stroke service, a neonatal resuscitation service, and other services. Their "tele-ICU services are covering a few hundred beds with this process,” Phillips said.
According the report in Healthcare-Informatics, the “results from deploying the virtual services across Intermountain have included reduced length-of-stay, decreased ER and urgent care visits, and improved mortality rates.”
“Although virtual health services are certainly catching on more at health systems these days, some physicians who are used to traditional care delivery are apprehensive.” However it looks like telehealth ‘will come to virtually to everyone in medicine because for a lot of conditions, it’s simply a more efficient way to deliver care,’ Philips says.”
While no one believes that in-person visits will not still be the standard, the idea of expert coverage at every hospital and physician’s office using the telehealth format is exciting. As this new technology rolls out it will require a cultural change.
BrightStar Care of Salt Lake City provides in-home health care services to seniors, children, and families. To learn about our care services, please visit our website.
Source: https://www.healthcare-informatics.com/article/telemedicine/making-care-connections-happen-how-intermountain-healthcare-moving-needle