Pediatric patients at rural emergency rooms and doctors’ offices are benefitting from consultations with specialties via telehealth, according to a new study.
Guidelines for
how to care for young patients in the ER can be lacking, according to a Reuters Health article published in the
Chicago Tribune. Further complicating care is that rural ER doctors may see “only a handful of pediatric patients a year,” the article states.
For the study, five rural hospitals installed telehealth to care for young ER patients. Those systems were linked to the University of California Davis Children’s Hospital pediatric intensive care unit that has a critical care doctor on duty, the article states. The study’s authors compared records for the two years before and two years after the telehealth systems were installed.
“The average quality of care score was 5.76 on a scale of one to seven for patients who received telemedicine consults, versus 5.38 for patients who received phone consultations and 5.26 for those who received no consultation,” the article states.
Telehealth for rural patients also can help practices with older patients. As
Part B News readers know, practices might be able to use telehealth to satisfy the face-to-face visit requirement of
transitional care management codes if CMS finalizes that proposal.