Telehealth in labor & deliveryTelemedicine Branching Out to the Smallest Patients

Telemedicine is getting much attention these days as innovative health systems look to increase operational efficiency and patient satisfaction. Leaders such as Stephen Klasko, MD at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital are mandating telemedicine and this top down approach will surely accelerate adoption.

Telemedicine is quickly moving beyond telestroke and the ICU. At least one major EMR company and one of the nation’s leading health systems – fortunately a PeriGen client – are investing significant resources to bring telemedicine to labor and delivery. Complexity, risk and attrition in the ranks of OBs and MFMs make labor and delivery an ideal service line in which to deploy these technologies. PeriGen’s fetal surveillance platform uses Artificial Intelligence to identify troubling patterns and long-term trends in fetal strips. This real time capability is now at the heart of a telemedicine infrastructure which allows a single OB to be alerted to specific cases – showing patterns identified as the most troubling – across an entire health system.

As a standalone tool or in concert with the above-mentioned EMR module, telemedicine creates a cost-effective way to leverage valuable clinical resources across an enterprise and help safeguard one of a health system’s most risky and most valuable service lines.

I’d love to hear how your meeting the twin challenges of improving patient safety and the expected shortage of labor & delivery providers.