Minnesota Children's Launches Telehealth Partnership With 6 Hospitals

Minnesota’s only pediatric hospital is launching a telehealth program to extend neonatal care to six hospitals across the state.

Children’s Minnesota, the seventh largest pediatric health system in the US, is partnering with Regina Medical Center in Hastings, District One Hospital in Faribault, New Ulm Medical Center, Buffalo Hospital, Cambridge Medical Center and Western Wisconsin Health in neighboring Baldwin, MI, on the connected health program.

Through the program, Children’s Minnesota will use a telemedicine platform to give the six hospitals audio-visual access to its Level IV neonatal clinicians. The clinicians will be able to advise staff at the smaller hospitals on care management, determine whether a newborn’s medical concerns merit emergency transport and help manage the transport process.

“Expert, specialized care should be available to all newborns, regardless of where they’re born,” Mark Bergeron, MD, director of special care nurseries and neonatal virtual care at Children’s Minnesota, said in a press release. “These partnerships bring us one step closer to that reality and help us achieve our vision of being every family’s essential partner in raising healthier kids by allowing us to provide our expertise to patients and families we couldn’t otherwise reach.”

With roughly 3,700 board-certified neonatologists and less than 1,000 neonatal intensive care units in the US, rural healthcare providers and hospitals often have a difficult time accessing specialist care when it’s most needed.

One of the nation’s largest tele-NICU networks can be found at Intermountain Healthcare. The Salt Lake City-based health system’s virtual care network, launched in 2012, now includes more than 20 hospitals throughout the Rocky Mountain region. In 2018, Intermountain’s program was profiled in a Health Affairs study that found the telehealth network reduced emergency transports by 20 percent and saved the health system more than $1.2 million.

“Transfer avoidance benefits local hospitals, payers, and patients,” the study pointed out. “By helping keep patients in community hospital beds, telehealth supports the financial viability of rural and suburban hospitals. Because families typically share in health care costs, avoiding a transfer would likely result in direct savings for the parents of a newborn.”

Just last summer, UMass Memorial Health Care launched its own tele-NICU program, helping outlying providers in the Worcester-based six-hospital system access neonatal care when needed.

“Most of our providers simply don’t see enough of these cases to be proficient in management of their care,” David Smith, the health system’s Associate Vice President of Virtual Medicine, noted.