The pending visit by Pope Francis has everyone in Philadelphia on edge – especially those in the city's hospitals, who are wondering how the massive crowds and intense security measures might affect people in need of medical assistance.
Those concerns have prompted Jefferson Health, a system comprised of five hospitals and 13 outpatient and urgent care centers, to launch its consumer-facing app earlier than anticipated. The On-Demand Virtual Care app, part of the health system's JeffConnect program, gives residents instant access to medical help through a smartphone.
[See also: Virtual clinics step toward Telehealth 2.0]
"With all that's going to be going on, it's not really reasonable for someone who's ill to walk five or eight or ten blocks to get to a hospital," Judd Hollander, MD, a professor of emergency medicine and Jefferson Health's associate dean for strategic health initiatives, told mHealth News. "With this, they don't have to go to Jefferson; Jefferson can go to them."
Papal priorities notwithstanding, the virtual care platform holds promise as a convenient and consumer-friendly platform for health systems throughout the country, as evidenced by the success of other hospitals and commercial telehealth vendors like American Well, Teladoc and MDLive, to name just a few. Jefferson Health officials are hoping that with the spotlight shining brightly on their city in the coming days, some of that attention will fall on the system's mHealth efforts.
The app is part of a much larger mHealth initiative launched several months ago at Jefferson Health, in a bid to differentiate the health system from its many competitors in one of the nation's largest metropolitan areas. The health system has a Virtual Rounds platform up and running, allowing video conferencing between clinicians, patient and their care team members both during and after the patient's stay. Hollander said the service has been used to connect bas many as four people in different locations – some as far away as California and Texas – with the health system for ongoing checkups.
[See also: Can telemedicine appeal to both consumers and providers?]
Hollander said officials had planned to launch the virtual care app in January; they'd trained some 200 clinicians on how to manage telehealth visits, and have been piloting the platform with employees. But with the Pope's visit to Philadelphia on Sept. 26 and 27 all but locking down the city's central section – where many health systems are located – Jefferson Health decided to go live a few months early.
The service is now available 24 hours a day at a cost of $49 (the app is a free download) to anyone in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and users don't have to be Jefferson Health patients or even local residents – an important point, considering the millions of visitors from all over the world expected to stream into the Philadelphia area. Physicians are able to prescribe medications through the app in Philadelphia and Delaware.
Hollander said Jefferson Health will have physicians at its hospitals or located nearby for patients needing to visit a hospital, but he's hoping the app will help residents and visitors find care that enables them to avoid going to an ER or clinic. He says the health system is positioning this as a service for everyone, not just Jefferson Health patients, and hopes this will lead to more collaborations between health systems down the road.
"We're not trying to take anyone away from their own doctors," he said. "Once they're done with this visit, they can go right back" to their healthcare providers. "It's a really, really simple process for anyone who knows it's there."
Homepage image via wikipedia">https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Pope_Francis_at_Varg....
[See also: Patients: telehealth tops the doctor's office]
