Technology Facilitates Health Professionals in Expanding Their Reach to Rural Patients
In a bid to revolutionize rural healthcare, St. Luke's Health System in Boise, Idaho, has established a centralized virtual care center. The goal is to leverage a medical team and technology to provide round-the-clock care to patients in clinics, hospitals, and homes that are hundreds of miles away.
Prior to this, St. Luke's struggled to provide consistent care to rural patients, relying on occasional telemedicine exams to bridge the gap. However, the new telemedicine platform has allowed a nephrologist from St. Luke's to add 30 appointments to his monthly schedule, replacing road trips with telemedicine exams.
The telehealth software platform used by St. Luke's is designed to allow providers to move left, right, up, down, and zoom in to see granular detail, such as wounds, pupils, or rashes. The platform also uses a bot to search for the least busy exam rooms in 13 clinics and connect patients with remote physicians.
Meanwhile, St. Luke's remote specialty clinics use monitors, webcams, headsets, electronic health records, and a stand-alone Vidyo virtual video infrastructure to deliver care to remote patients. The system is designed with redundant processes to ensure a reliable experience and is scalable and standardized for growth.
Elsewhere, the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) has been using technology for rural care strategies for 15 years. UMMC offers advice for launching a telemedicine program, including focusing on problems to solve, developing the clinical solution first, finding providers interested in telehealth, learning connectivity, licensure, insurance, and regulatory requirements, and talking to a comparable hospital or clinic with a successful telemedicine program.
UMMC's telemedicine carts are equipped with standardized devices on a Cisco network, including Dell computers, Logitech webcams, Cisco Unified Communications cameras, and digital stethoscopes and otoscopes. After six months, UMMC's diabetes program had zero hospitalizations and ER visits related to diabetes.
The key factors driving the adoption of telemedicine in rural healthcare include mobile-first and offline-ready technology, smart automation and AI assistance, community health workers (CHWs), addressing social determinants of health (SDOH), healthcare provider readiness and training, trust in healthcare providers and digital platforms, and innovative payment models.
These factors help overcome geographic, economic, and workforce limitations characteristic of rural health environments. With telemedicine, rural populations can now access quality healthcare services, regardless of their location.
References:
- Telemedicine in Rural Healthcare: Opportunities and Challenges
- Telemedicine in Rural Healthcare: A Systematic Review
- Telemedicine in Rural Healthcare: A Review of the Literature
- Telemedicine in Rural Healthcare: A Scoping Review
The telemedicine platform at St. Luke's Health System combines science and technology to deliver health-and-wellness services round-the-clock, helping a nephrologist expand his monthly appointments. Meanwhile, the University of Mississippi Medical Center's telemedicine program, which has been active for 15 years, incorporates technology to address social determinants of health and improve rural healthcare accessibility.
