Beaumont Hospital: Virtual Consultation

Background

Beaumont Hospital is a large academic teaching hospital, employing 3,000 staff and providing emergency and acute care services across 54 medical specialties to a local community of some 290,000 people.

Changes in the way that healthcare was delivered in Beaumont Hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic was needed to reduce staff exposure to ill persons, preserve personal protective equipment (PPE), and minimise the impact of patient surges on the health service. Healthcare services have had to adjust the way they triage, evaluate, and care for patients using methods that do not rely on in-person services. With social distancing efforts and stay-at-home measures in effect for most, Beaumont Hospital needed to utilise a “virtual” care model to limit unneeded in-person interactions.

Solution

The hospital chose T-Pro as their preferred supplier of virtual consultation services, to help provide necessary care to patients while minimising the transmission risk of the virus to staff and patients.

T-Pro eClinic Manager is a customised virtual consultation solution that allows the hospital to put on virtual clinics and enable clinicians to treat patients online through their smartphones, tablets and desktop computers. As a result, thousands of appointments that would otherwise have been cancelled were able to go ahead, ensuring that patients are still able to access the care they need.

• Schedule virtual clinic appointments from any PAS/EPR scheduled visit or create one manually.
• Customise templates for new appointments, reminders, cancellations etc.
• Send patient secure email or SMS to access appointments - no account or installation required.
• Automatic routing of patients to the right clinic, track patient wait time, triage and prep patients from the comfort of their homes.
• Flexible options to conduct virtual appointment using either video or telephone.
• Support for multidisciplinary teams working with group video sessions.
• Take photo snapshots during the session to monitor treatment progress.
• Share screens with patients when appropriate e.g. to show x-rays.
• Instant chat messaging - share attachments and/or video links to manage patient conditions.
• Immediate access to booking notes, and contextually appropriate patient records.
• Ability to add/remove other participants from the appointment at any time.
• Generate attendance reports for compliance and reimbursement.
• Integrated digital dictation and speech recognition to document the virtual encounter at your desk or on the go.

"With T-Pro eClinic Manager, we can provide our patients with secure access to care and optimise the time of available staff during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. The fact T-Pro is integrated with our PAS, we can automatically schedule virtual clinic appointments, which really makes a difference in terms of saving valuable staff time, and removing manual data entry."

Mark Graham
ICT Director, Beaumont Hospital

Benefits

In the first three months, 1,042 video visits were conducted, which has steadily increased each month. The uptake in virtual consultation use during this time frame has been accompanied by a decline of in-person visits, facilitating Beaumont Hospital and the public health mitigation strategies during this pandemic by reducing footfall in the interest of safety. eClinic Manager is proven to be a safer option for staff and patients by reducing potential infectious exposures, and reducing the strain on their health services by minimising the surge of patient demand on facilities and reducing the use of PPE by healthcare providers.

Key Outcomes

• Timely and appropriate access to care by connecting clinicians and patients remotely.
• Enhanced operational efficiency and increased capacity with virtual exam rooms.
• Reduced readmissions, and transports through robust telehealth solutions.
• Increased patient satisfaction by providing convenient access to healthcare.
• Made travel optional for patients in a way that is scalable and sustainable.

With the help of T-Pro, the hospital is able to maintain continuity of care and avoid additional negative consequences from delayed preventive, chronic, or routine care. Remote access to healthcare services also increased participation for those who are medically or socially vulnerable or who do not have ready access to providers. Remote access helps preserve the patient-provider relationship at times when an in-person visit is not practical or feasible.