Doctor's Care, a chain of urgent care centers in South Carolina and Tennessee, calls on telemedicine to balance the patient load at its centers and improve patient satisfaction, reports Health Data Management.
The organization found that wait times at some of its sites could last up to three hours or more, while other locations had no wait times. In those situations, it found patients opted to be examined remotely, aided by a nurse or medical assistant at their current location.
As some urgent-care providers see telemedicine siphoning off their business, Doctor's Care decided to embrace the trend.
"This is just looking at this as a consumer, and when we did that, we just said that this is where [care] is going, and so we have to have some kind of service offering here," said David Boucher, president and chief operating officer of UCI Medical Affiliates, which operates the clinics.
The service requires a high-definition connection for the sites, and an all-in-one camera supports otoscope and dermatology examinations, the article notes. Bluetooth-enabled stethoscopes are used at both presentation and provider sites, while lab and X-ray procedures are done at the original site, and physicians can "see" another patient while tests are being run.
Rather than having to invest in new infrastructure for telemedicine, however, Doctor's Care was able to build off its existing telephone and network infrastructure, according to the article.
To learn more:
- read the article