Telemedicine allows rural hospitals like Piggott Health System to transform the community’s expectations, and other hospitals across the country are embracing telemedicine and accelerating new ideas of value in small market health care.
One of those hospitals is Sullivan County Community Hospital, a 25-bed critical access hospital in Indiana. When hospital leadership made the decision to add an Access TeleCare teleHospitalist service line, its impact was felt well beyond the walls of the hospital.
Overcoming a Lack of Specialty Access With Telemedicine
Before the program launched, primary care doctors who primarily practice in the outpatient clinics near the hospital were pulling double duty by also covering the hospital’s inpatients. Those primary care doctors quickly became burned out, and a lack of physician coverage resulted for both the hospital and the surrounding clinics.
Access TeleCare’s teleHospitalist program changed all of that.
Chris Gallagher, M.D.
President/CEO
Access TeleCare
“This is really one of those partnerships that highlights the purpose of Access TeleCare and what we do every day. Leveraging telemedicine to reduce physician burnout and increase capacity to improve an entire region’s access to care is the difference that our programs are making around the country.”
Decreasing Physician Burnout by Increasing Capacity
The teleHospitalist program at Sullivan County Community Hospital meant the primary care physicians in the area could focus on their outpatient clinic duties and the hospital had the physician resources it needed to deliver excellent local care and meet its community expectations for 24/7 inpatient capacity .
By adding needed hospitalist capacity through telemedicine, Access TeleCare’s teleHospitalist programs can make hospitals of any size a valuable resource for their region, reducing the need for clinic physicians to cover hospital patients. This creates positive ripple effects for other care providers in the area, giving them added capacity, reducing physician burnout, and helping more patients get the care they need sooner.
Contact us to see the difference Access TeleCare can make for your hospital.
