Critical access hospitals face many challenges. Throw a pandemic on top of them, and suddenly there is an even greater need to find solutions for these challenges.
Budgets are a high priority for a hospital of any size, but when budget cuts hit a critical access hospital, a challenging situation only gets worse. These hospitals are often providing uncompensated care, which can cause budget issues. Various government funding policies can also take money away from the annual budget.
Medicare dollars can help offset these losses, but only if your reporting process is correct. For example, how you identify bad debt and charity care will influence how much money can be directed your way via Medicare. But what about other areas, such as telehealth options? Can they save money while improving patient care? Given the growth of telehealth services, the answer is a big “yes.”
Finding Cost Effective Solutions
Rural residents are often too far away from a healthcare provider. It’s for this reason that telehealth has become a go-to option for those living in rural areas. They can still benefit from their nearest critical access hospital, but through various technologies that allow them to connect with specialists.
Telehealth takes away the travel component, which can be a big factor for the elderly. Not only does this make sense for the rural residents, it also cuts down on the wait times for patients who receive care at the hospital.
The benefits also extend to doctors in rural areas who need extra training on medical procedures, which can be taken care of via telehealth. This is being done to provide more specialty care in rural areas, residents of which would otherwise have to travel quite far to an urban setting where the specialty care offerings are comparatively vast.
Choosing a Telehealth Vendor
Teleradiology is a form of telehealth that is bringing many efficiencies to the average critical access hospital. For those that are using outdated platforms, the lag in outcomes is most noticeable.
Rather than invest portions of the budget toward new technologies and infrastructure, critical access hospitals are finding that they can skip the on-premise burdens and choose a cloud-based radiology solution that meets their telehealth needs.
The best cloud-based radiology specialists bring the power of visibility to the forefront. They do this through new ways of approaching teleradiology workflow. With the right tools at your disposal, faster, more reliable and higher quality patient care becomes possible.
At OffSite Image Management, our TeleRad 360 service solves many problems. Our clients finally feel like they’ve gotten a sense of control over their exam workflow process. They get this through key aspects of the solution, including the ability to rapidly change priority levels on exams. Voice recognition is one of the tools in our arsenal that assist in reporting and has the side effect of improving workflow.
If you’re looking for more exam accountability, you’ll get it with OffSite’s TeleRad solution. Find out more about what is involved by visiting the TeleRad 360 site.
