One of the nation's largest Catholic health systems is putting its faith in telemedicine with the creation of a standalone virtual medical center.
The St. Louis-based Mercy health system broke ground in May on a 120,000-square-foot facility designed to consolidate all its telemedicine initiatives under one roof. The $50 million building in Chesterfield, Mo., will be home to 300 physicians, nurses, researchers and support staff when it opens in 2015.
Health system officials expect to reap financial benefits from telemedicine as the nation's healthcare payment landscape moves to value-based models,
“Virtual care has the possibility of radically transforming outcomes for certain patients,” said Randy Moore, MD, MBA, president of Mercy Virtual. “It plugs many holes in the system so you get simpler and more effective interventions at an earlier stage.”
Although there are limited, but growing, possibilities for direct payment, the real value for virtual centers like Mercy’s will be in maximizing care.
“Sepsis is the top problem confronting healthcare systems – a condition where every hour of delay in treatment can result in 6 percent worse outcomes,” Moore said. “Turnkey telesepsis solutions can accelerate recognition and treatment, enabling Mercy to decrease mortality by over 50 percent and lower costs per case by over $8,000.”
All of the money saved when the patient does not take a turn for the worse goes directly to operating margins. The same holds true in population-based or shared-saving payment contracts.
As telemedicine matures, Moore thinks the virtual center may become an income stream for Mercy. Smaller hospitals and systems that don't have the size and economies of scale to build their own virtual center may contract with Mercy for these services - an idea supported by Jonathan Linkous, chief executive officer of the American Telemedicine Association.
“The intention of the Mercy project is to improve the quality of care for patients throughout their system, help reduce the cost of care by sharing specialists and also be able to create revenue by being able to provide this service to other institutions outside the Mercy system,” Linkous said. “I think most of their costs could be covered just by internal savings, so doing things like telestroke treatment for non-system hospitals become a source of additional income.”
In addition to helping save costs and potentially bringing in revenue, a virtual center for telemedicine can help improve the quality of care, added Wendy Deibert, vice president of Mercy's Telehealth Services, due to the amount of data and use of analytics to understand that data.
“We will continue to evolve algorithms as the larger volumes of patients allow us to more quickly prove which interventions result in better outcomes,” she said.
Kurt Ullman is a long-time RN and has been a medical writer for nearly 30 years. He has published more than 500 articles and has won multiple Apex and National Health Information Awards. He holds an associate degree in nursing from Purdue University and a Bachelor's degree in public affairs-mass communications media and a Master's in health administration, both from Indiana University.
(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in Healthcare Finance News, a sister publication of the HIMSS Media Group.)
