Hospitals' Telehealth Partnership Aims to Cut Down on Long Travel Times

To cope with long travel times, a virtual care collaboration between Ascension St Vincent’s Chilton and UAB Medicine aims to provide tele-critical and tele-stroke care to people living in Chilton County.

Ascension St Vincent’s Chilton is a 30-bed hospital in Clanton, Alabama, providing general acute care and outpatient services. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, UAB Medicine is a large academic medical center that provides care for more than 1.6 million patients annually.

Through the partnership, remote appointments will take place at an operations center at UAB Hospital, enabling specialists to meet with patients through video. The UAB specialists will also work with care teams from Ascension St. Vincent’s when creating treatment plans.

The tele-critical care program will allow hospitalists from Ascension St. Vincent’s Chilton to connect with UAB intensivists, who will remotely review patient medical records and perform virtual assessments.

If a patient visits the emergency department with stroke-related symptoms, they will be directed to the tele-stroke program, which will include a virtual consultation with a UAB neurologist. The neurologist will assess the patient using an NIH stroke scale and a physical exam with the help of onsite nurses and physicians. Ascension St. Vincent’s Chilton will then either admit the patient or transfer them based on their needs.

“The tele-ICU program provides an extremely valuable service to our local community. We are able to bring the specialized knowledge of UAB critical care specialists to the bedside, providing the highest-quality care for critically ill patients,” said Sean Vanlandingham, MD, chief medical officer of Ascension St. Vincent’s Chilton, in a press release. “I am grateful to our local hospitalist physicians and the remote UAB intensivists who have partnered together seamlessly to make this program a success.”

Considering that healthcare is often hard to access in rural communities, St. Vincent’s Chilton and UAB Medicine believe that the tele-critical and tele-stroke programs can help.

In recent years, various organizations have sought to improve rural healthcare access through virtual care.

In February 2020, UAB developed a telehealth pilot program to assist rural residents at risk of developing lung cancer. The goal of the program was to benefit patients traveling long distances for lung cancer care and expedite diagnosis and treatment. 

In April, several rural providers earmarked funds provided by a large US Department of Agriculture grant to improve telehealth services. For example, Neosho Memorial Regional Medical Center planned to use the $434,300 it received to implement telehealth infrastructure and upgrade information systems. Appleton Area Health in Minnesota planned to use a portion of its $174,300 grant to install 28 monitors in exam and patient rooms to enhance telehealth services.