The Arizona Telemedicine Program Blog

Telemedicine is a relatively new way to bring medical examinations, diagnosis and treatment services to a patient over a network. Telemedicine solutions that include peripherals, such as a stethoscope, otoscope and high quality zoom camera, bring patients face-to-face with an offsite physician who can quickly examine, diagnose and provide treatment options during an off-hours emergency.

The use of a telemedicine system within a skilled nursing facility (SNF) not only opens dialogue between healthcare professionals at different facilities, but also allows an offsite physician to more rapidly access and diagnose the patient and recommend treatment based on a first-hand evaluation, offering an even greater level of patient care. With these benefits in mind, telemedicine is becoming increasingly important for skilled nursing facilities facing a wave of new penalties stemming from changing rules governing patient readmissions.

“Telemedicine doesn’t work!” That’s what I heard a few years ago from two angry friends who knew I worked in the field of telebehavioral health.

It turned out that the husband had had symptoms that led the ED staff at their local hospital to think he might be having a stroke. That hospital had a telestroke service, which was used to determine whether he had had an ischemic stroke and needed the clot-busting drug tPA to save his life.

In 2006, Banner Health made the decision to equip every one of their ICU beds with an eICU system that provides round-the-clock, “remote” care to critical care patients. Banner Telehealth’s eICU operations centers, located in Mesa, Ariz., Denver, Colo., Santa Monica, Calif., and Tel Aviv, Israel, has helped reduce patient mortality and shortened ICU stays.

In 2013, Banner took another step toward state-of-the-art intensive care, by implementing a tele-echocardiography system to relay patients’ echocardiographic images to the eICU in real time. This was achieved by training respiratory therapists to obtain the images and project them in real time to the tele-ICU physician via the tele-ICU Camera.

Congratulations to The Arizona Republic on its 125 years of publishing in Arizona. As part of its anniversary celebration, the newspaper compiled several historical Top 10 lists, including “Top 10 Health Stories from Arizona in the past 125 years,” by Ken Alltucker.

The list includes the 1918 flu pandemic, Arizona’s Medicaid launch, the state’s first heart-transplant surgery, formation of an early multi-hospital system (Samaritan Health, now Banner Health), hosting of a tuberculosis colony in the 1920s and 30s, producing and testing scorpion anti-venom, pioneering brain surgery, making strides in genomic medicine research, the Affordable Care Act, and telemedicine advances.

In rural areas, telemedicine offers patients the opportunity to get specialty health services and physician consultations without the need for extensive travel. Rural telemedicine may be the great equalizer for rural populations, which typically experience reduced services and less favorable health outcomes compared to populations served by large medical centers.