Midwest Providers Expand Specialty Care Telehealth Partnership

Ohio-based Cincinnati Children's is collaborating with Parkview Health to launch telehealth clinics to expand healthcare access for children seeking pediatric neurosurgery, rheumatology, and drug-resistant epilepsy consultations.

Launching in August, the telehealth clinics will enable Fort Wayne, Indiana-based Parkview Regional Medical Center clinicians to connect with Cincinnati Children's specialty care physicians for consultations in the above specialties. Children from northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio receiving outpatient care at Parkview Regional will be eligible for these consultations and care coordination services.

"The goal of our new, enhanced collaboration with Cincinnati Children's is to better meet the needs of our community," said Tom Miller, MD, physician executive, Women and Children's service line, at Parkview Health, in the news release. "Our collaboration is patient-centered and will increase access to Cincinnati Children's specialty care for Fort Wayne area families. This could reduce or even eliminate the need for travel to receive specialized pediatric care. For patients who require care at Cincinnati Children's, a coordinated approach for referrals and local follow-up appointments will streamline the experiences of these families."

The collaboration is built on a partnership between Parkview Health and Cincinnati Children's that launched in 2018. The initial telehealth collaboration focused on enhancing pediatric care expertise in cardiology, gastroenterology, and general surgery.

Per the new collaboration, the organizations will share best practices and treatment protocols in addition to enabling telehealth-based consultations for children with complex medical needs. Teams from both organizations will spend time on the other's campus to support the expansion of specialty care delivery. They also plan to add more medical specialties to their collaboration through a virtual care center.

With access to healthcare being a significant issue in rural areas and among underserved communities, healthcare provider organizations have increasingly been turning to telehealth to extend pediatric specialty care services.

For instance, Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital announced plans in March to expand its neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) neurology program through telehealth. Through the expansion, the hospital's neurologists can monitor babies remotely and recommend treatments to caregivers at three Level III NICUs in Utah and one in Billings, Montana. The hospital's neurology NICU team will use remote EEG technology to provide continuous seizure monitoring for babies in the Level III NICUs.

Another recent telehealth partnership aimed to enhance neonatal intensive and higher-acuity care access for newborns in New Mexico. San Juan Regional Medical Center in Farmington, New Mexico, entered a telehealth partnership with Presbyterian Hospital's NICU team at the end of last year. Through the partnership, San Juan Regional's clinicians can participate in virtual video consultations with Presbyterian's NICU team and access ongoing medical education.

"The telemedicine component…allows us to, I think, more comfortably keep babies closer to home," Brad Scoggins, DO, pediatrician and medical director at San Juan Regional, told mHealthIntelligence in an interview. "We weren't able to [do that previously] because there was this big chasm in knowledge and experience. Not only from the physicians' standpoint but from the nurses' and respiratory therapists' [standpoint]. If [neonatologists] can literally be at the bedside with the telemedicine piece, I think that helps [our staff] feel a lot better about the quality and type of work that we're doing with babies."

But trends in pediatric specialty telehealth use are varied, with one study showing that pediatric telehealth use was inconsistent across subspecialties.

For the study, published in JAMA Network Open, researchers assessed data for 549,306 patients receiving care at eight pediatric medical groups within the Children's Specialty Care Coalition (CSCC) between Jan. 1, 2019, and Dec. 31, 2021. Pediatric care spanned 11 subspecialties: cardiology, orthopedics, urology, nephrology, dermatology, genetics, behavioral health, pulmonology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, and neurology.

They found that virtual visit utilization in certain subspecialties, like genetics, behavioral health, and pulmonology, was high, ranging from 38.8 percent to 73 percent. But virtual visit utilization in others, such as cardiology, orthopedics, and urology, ranged from 6 percent to 29 percent.