Innovative Care Delivery System Aims to Transform Practices

Created and launched by the Guthrie Clinic (Guthrie), a new innovative care delivery system aims to provide patients with care through various virtual services, working to improve outcomes and expand care while lessening the need to travel.

Amid recognition of the prominence of technology in healthcare, Guthrie added an innovative care delivery system. Known as the Guthrie Pulse Center, this system provides patients with high-end care along with improved access, independent of patient location.

“The investment Guthrie has made in this center furthers the organization’s transformational vision for providing enhanced patient care, quality and safety. Simply put, we are defining tomorrow – today,”  Edmund Sabanegh, MD, president and chief executive officer of Guthrie, said in the press release.

Various services such as virtual ICU nurses, intensivists, and telemetry are either currently a part of the Pulse Center or will be soon. Other assets of the program include a virtual care team to assist physicians at the bedside, along with computers, video, and audio capabilities to transmit vital signs and test results.

Guthrie anticipated that the delivery system would improve patient outcomes, including shorter hospital stays, enhanced results, and quality care more proximal to home, as well as improve patient satisfaction.

“This initiative is positioning Guthrie to better meet patients’ future needs as health care delivery models evolve, improving care and access in a variety of settings across the large geographic region that Guthrie serves,” said Terri Couts, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Guthrie.

Given that the Guthrie Pulse Center is gaining attention across the healthcare sector, the organization holds high confidence in the program.

Earlier this month, an independent patient safety organization known as ECRI named the Guthrie Clinic the winner of the 2023 Health Technology Excellence Award. This honor alluded to the high credibility of Guthrie technology and provided the organization with a solid foundation for developing the Guthrie Pulse Center.

Efforts to provide care through modern technology continue to skyrocket, an example of which took place at Michigan Medicine in April. In this program, the system implemented what was known as the Mobile Monitoring Transformation Project. This resource would then allow providers to access cardiac monitoring data through mobile devices.

Through the Michigan Medicine system, care teams would have the ability to review data while absent from the bedside. They would also have access to trend data, assisting them in determining root causes, ultimately leading to improved timeliness of care.

As the emergence of these new strategies continues, various research efforts supporting their implementation also exist.

In June 2022, for example, researchers from the University of California San Diego studied the use of text messaging to alert patients of appointments, finding it to be a successful method. They reached this conclusion after noting that a large portion of a patient sample used the text messaging tool, and that tardiness did not occur. Other benefits of the program included higher earliness rates and time saved.