The Massachusetts health system will soon be rolling out a telehealth program aimed at connecting rural hospitals and clinics with NICU specialists to help improve care and outcomes for its most fragile patients.
A Massachusetts-based health system known for its telemedicine work in ICU and stroke care is preparing to launch a telehealth program for its tiniest patients.
Officials at UMass Memorial Health Care say a tele-NICU program being rolled out this summer will be one of only a few in the country. The connected care platform is aimed at helping outlying providers in the Worcester-based six-hospital network treat newborns by providing virtual access to neo-natal intensive care specialists.
“Most of our providers simply don’t see enough of these cases to be proficient in management of their care,” Teresa Rincon, RN, PhD, the health system’s Director of Clinical Operations and Innovations for Telehealth, said during this week’s Northeast Regional Telehealth Conference in Portland, Maine.
Roughly 10 percent of all babies born in the US are premature, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and about 17 percent of infant deaths are the result of preterm birth and low birth weight. In addition, these babies also have increased risk of a wide range of health concerns, including breathing and feeding problems, developmental delays, vision and hearing problems and cerebral palsy.
Access to NICU care has been shown to greatly improve health outcomes for pre-term newborns, but like any specialist care, those experts are few and far between and care is expensive. With roughly 1,000 NICUs scattered across the country, telehealth and mHealth advocates are pushing for virtual care programs that can extend care from those centers out to smaller and rural hospitals and clinics.
Roughly two years ago, researchers at the Mayo Clinic found that access to NICU specialists could help rural and remote hospitals reduce transports by one-third, improving care and outcomes for those patients (and their families) and helping those hospitals to keep more of their patients.
“The enhanced access to neonatologists, who could remotely assess the newborn and guide the local care team through the resuscitation, allowed one-third of the babies to stay with their families in the local hospital,” Jennifer Fang, MD, a Mayo Clinic fellow in neonatal-perinatal medicine, said in a 2016 press release issued by the hospital. “This allowed the patients to receive the correct level of care in the right location – increasing the value of care. Also, the potential cost savings can be substantial.”
Among the front-runners in the tele-NICU movement is Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare, which launched its virtual care platform in 2012. The hospital’s program, which connects almost two dozen Rocky Mountain hospitals to four NICUs in a hub-and-spoke network, was profiled last year in a study published in the journal Health Affairs.
“We’re raising the level at all of the hospitals,” Stephen Minton, MD, the medical director of neonatology at Intermountain’s Utah Valley Hospital in Provo, told mHealthIntelligence in a January 2019 interview. “And that level of care … is significantly better than it was before.”
According to Rincon, UMass Memorial’s NICU specialists often have to deliver care over a phone, guiding providers in distant locations through the process of stabilizing a newborn and preparing him or her for transfer to the NICU, a harrowing journey that could take more than an hour.
With a telehealth program, she said, a telemedicine cart with an audio-visual link could be positioned next to the baby’s bed so that specialists could see and hear what is taking place. Wireless devices could also capture vital signs in real time, allowing those specialists to make care management decisions that might even negate the need for a transfer to the NICU.
UMass Memorial officials have also refined the technology platform, Rincon said, so that specialists can be contacted at a moment’s notice on the nearest device – such as a smartphone. They can then seamlessly transition to a laptop or workstation when appropriate without breaking the connection.
The new service will add to an impressive telehealth platform at UMass Memorial, which developed one of the first CPAP (Child Psychiatry Access Project) programs in the nation and is well known for its tele-ICU and telestroke programs, launched respectively in 2010 and 2009. That success has allowed the health system to plan for some 15 new connected health services or programs over the next year or two.
“There are literally hundreds of opportunities for us in telemedicine,” Rincon noted.
Date: June 20, 2019
Source: mHealthIntelligence