Intermountain launches virtual hospital

Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare has launched Intermountain Connect Care Pro, one of the nation’s largest virtual hospital services. The company said that the service employs 35 telehealth programs and more than 500 caregivers with the goal of enabling patients to receive medical care regardless of where they are.

{mprestriction ids="1,3"}Connect Care Pro provides basic medical care as well as advanced services, such as stroke evaluation, mental health counseling, intensive care and newborn critical care.  While it doesn’t replace the need for onsite caregivers, it supplements existing staff and provides specialized services in rural communities where those types of medical care usually aren’t readily available, the company said.

Because the healthcare services are online and digital, Connect Care Pro isn’t located in a specific building, but provides much of the same care that a person would find in a large, medically advanced hospital. The clinically integrated, digitally enabled approach not only improves the quality of care in the communities served, but saves patients and clinicians time and money, Intermountain said.

Intermountain cited the example of an infant at a southern Utah hospital was being supported via Connect Care Pro services and receiving a critical care consultation that allows the sick baby to stay in that facility instead of being transferred to a newborn intensive care unit in Salt Lake City. This single avoided transfer would have cost over $18,000 dollars. The parents of this baby would be able to remain in their community, surrounded by their support system, instead of traveling what would have amounted to 400 miles and a seven-hour round trip every time they wanted to see their baby. Using this technology to reduce the need for transfers of ill newborns to other hospitals, Intermountain has lowered the cost of care for patients by more than $2.1 million over the past several years.

All Intermountain Healthcare hospitals, including 10 of Intermountain’s rural hospitals, use the offerings of the virtual hospital to supplement their existing services, and nine hospitals outside the Intermountain Healthcare system have already signed up to provide high-level care and keep patients closer to home whenever possible.

One such hospital is Kane County Hospital, an independent rural facility located in Kanab.  “Our partnership with Intermountain Connect Care Pro has had a huge positive impact on our community,” said Charlene Kelly, chief nursing officer at the hospital. “Kanab has had one of the highest suicide rates in the state, not including patients that come to us from our border town in Arizona, and we don’t have a crisis worker here. Trying to place a patient who has not had a crisis evaluation was next to impossible. With crisis care from Intermountain Healthcare, patients receive that crisis evaluation in less than an hour and if the crisis worker recommends inpatient treatment they assist in placing the patient. Our providers just love having this service available.”

Intermountain also plans to extend Connect Care Pro services in the community where they can easily be accessed in underserved areas. Discussions are underway to put patient kiosks or access devices in locations such as homeless shelters, schools, community centers and perhaps jails to make care more accessible. 

Intermountain Healthcare is a not-for-profit system of 22 hospitals, 180 clinics, a medical group with 1,500 employed physicians, a health plans division called SelectHealth and other health services.{/mprestriction}