Across the country, physicians are burned out and patients are either struggling to find access or waiting too long to receive the care they desperately need. This situation, however, is not specific to the pandemic, as healthcare norganizations have seen these issues growing for a number of years. Coupled with hospital closures in rural areas and a nationwide shortage of specialists, hospitals, physicians and patients alike need a sustainable solution to the delivery of specialty care.
SOC Telemed is the nationwide leader in the growing acute care telemedicine space, partnering with healthcare organizations to build sustainable specialty programs in a multitude of clinical service lines. Built on proven and scalable infrastructure as an enterprise-wide solution, our proprietary software technology, Telemed IQ, allows us to virtually deliver time-sensitive care when and where patients need it most. Telemed IQ supports workflows for more than 20 specialties and is positioned to be the single acute care solutions provider for health systems, hospitals and physician groups across the country.
We created Telemed IQ to enable providers to deploy, optimize and scale a telemedicine program rapidly, seamlessly, and cost effectively across all care sites and in any specialty. Our physicians support some of the most critically understaffed areas including ICU, pulmonology, psychiatry, and neurology. Other specialties include cardiology, infectious disease, maternal-fetal medicine, endocrinology, and nephrology. Simply put, Telemed IQ provides patients better access to specialty care, allowing hospitals and other healthcare organizations to strengthen their care models, patient outcomes, and the health of the organization itself. Over the course of 17 years and tens of thousands of touchpoints, we truly understand the clinical workflows needed to support providerinitiated patient care and the rigor required to achieve the highest clinical quality standards. Our customers include 19 of the 25 largest health systems in the nation, and we’ve enabled nearly 1,000 facilities in 47 states to manage complex, acute workflows while providing life-saving care.
However, creating Telemed IQ was not without its challenges. Through more than a million virtual consultations, our team has come together to build a platform that can be configured in a multitude of ways. As our hospital partners became more sophisticated, we built a platform that allowed us to create a variety of solutions to serve different specialties and clinicians. Though telemedicine has existed for several years, this is still a new frontier. Clinicians are no longer required to work inside the four walls of a hospital. We can now virtually deliver clinicians to the emergency department, inpatient floors and many other care settings, benefiting hospitals, patients and physicians alike. The ability to offer expanded services through telemedicine unlocks revenue for hospitals while also offering patients greater access to care.
For example, without around-the-clock access to a neurologist, a hospital cannot achieve stroke certification. Ambulance services know which hospitals are stroke certified, and if the nearest hospital isn’t, the patient will be driven to a hospital up to two hours away for treatment. This is detrimental to care because the longer a patient waits before receiving treatment, the more damaging the stroke is.
Financial challenges coincide with those clinical challenges. If ambulances consistently bypass a hospital without stroke certification, revenue goes to a different facility, directly impacting the hospital’s financial viability. Telemed IQ enables a hospital to offer robust clinical services in their own facility through on-demand access to physicians. This means a neurologist is available to see stroke patients at any hour of the day, improving timeliness of care and patient outcomes. Psychiatrists can see patients quickly, preventing those with mental health concerns from overwhelming an ED. Intensivists can support ICU care teams and reduce the need for patient transfers. The technology enables hospitals to use only the clinical resources they need versus a full on-site staffing model, thus making care more affordable.
Our platform also creates more options for physicians. With specialists available through Telemed IQ to cover arduous night and weekend shifts, local physician burnout can be addressed. Additionally, virtual clinicians are able to see more patients per day and enjoy addressing challenging cases. They are seeing and treating more complex cases than the average in-person specialist would see in the same period of time. At SOC Telemed, our mission is to bring specialty care to every patient in every corner of the country. Our innovative Telemed IQ platform allows us to address physician shortages and burnout, overwhelmed hospitals, and patients who need timely care. We will continue to work relentlessly to meet the challenge. We’re excited to change the face of healthcare, providing better care for patients, more viable hospitals and a better work environment for onsite care teams.