Telemedicine empowers sufferer satisfaction at urgent care chain

For several urgent care contributors, telemedicine is a competitor that is siphoning off patients.

That is not the opinion of Doctor’s Care, which is ramping up its utilization of telemedicine as a way to offer sufferers more choices for receiving care.

The chain of fifty-five centers in South Carolina and Tennessee is spreading its offerings with a minimal contribution in technology, utilizing information and communications systems that it already has in place.

While various urgent care center operators are wary that telemedicine may divert sufferers from its basic facilities that are not the perspective of David Boucher, president and chief operating officer of UCI Medical Affiliates, which gives non-medical support facilities for the chain and operates the centers.

“This is something that we require to do,” Boucher claims. “This is merely observing at this as a consumer, and when we did that, we only claimed that this is where [care] is going, and so we have to have few type of service offering here.”

Doctors Care 1^st started examining telemedicine in the year 2013, analyzing it as a way to balance loads between its services or facilities. Wait times at few of its urgent care location could be 3 hours or more, while other sites had no wait times. By equipping facilities with telemedicine capabilities, it would be capable to give sufferers at busy facilities the chance to be seen instantly and remotely.

While few urgent care operators have had mixed outcomes with utilizing telemedicine for load balancing, Doctors Care discovered that sufferers chose to be analyzed remotely. In entire examinations, a nurse is with sufferers in the facility at which they present.

In its load balancing access, there is a high-definition or HD connection for the locations, and an all-in-one camera that supports otoscope and dermatology observation of the throat, ear, eye, nose, or skin. Bluetooth-enabled stethoscopes are utilized at both presentation and contributor locations, and sufferers are capable to have lab and X-ray processes at the presentation location; physicians analyzing sufferers remotely can switch to another sufferer until these tests are run.

The IT contribution for load balancing was minor, Boucher claims. Instead of installing entirely new infrastructure to motivate telemedicine, Doctors Care was capable to make off its existing telephone and network complex from Cisco.

The ability helped Doctors Choice to acquire 2 of its key targets of decreasing sufferer wait times and increasing sufferer satisfaction, states Boucher, who is offering a presentation on the chain’s experiences at this week’s popular spring conference of the Urgent Care Association of America in the state of Orlando, Fla.