Company offers telemedicine expertise
Focus on chronically ill, early hospital discharges
If you would like more managed care business, but the cost and management of telemedicine services intimidate you, why not let someone else handle the technology?
Strategic Monitored Services, a New York City-based company, provides management and financial expertise for the execution and delivery of telemedicine services to home care providers, managed care organizations, hospitals, physician groups, and those interested in providing telemedicine services.
Strategic customizes its "joint venture" arrangements with agencies and payers, says Loretta Schlachta, RN, MS, clinical director. "We have a number of different arrangements depending on what the payer or agency would like to do." (For an example of an agency that manages the system on its own, see p. 51.)
Although the company manages the system setup, monitoring, and data collection, it doesn’t own the telemedicine equipment. Instead, Strategic contracts with telemedicine vendors to use the technology that best fits the patients’ needs.
"Depending on what the agency or payer wants to accomplish and what the needs of the patient are, we will go to the system that has the capabilities to monitor those things," Schlachta says.
Helping the chronically ill
Strategic’s services target two critical patient groups for payers: the chronically ill and patients discharged early from the hospital.
"We try to keep chronically ill folks healthier by trying to catch things before they deteriorate. That way providers can take aggressive action and nip problems in the bud before patients get to the point where they have to go to the emergency [department], be admitted to the hospital, or go into the intensive care unit," Schlachta says.
Strategic specifically targets chronic diseases such as congestive heart failure, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, AIDS, and diabetes. "Across the country, these are traditionally the high-dollar chronic diseases for most health care organizations," she says. "These folks usually represent high utilization rates of health care resources. They’re in the hospital, the ER, clinics, and doctors’ office a lot. They require a large amount of resources as far as medications.
"If we can control these patients, we can make significant inroads into health care costs and also improve the patients’ quality of life. They can be better managed and stay out of the hospital," she adds. "Their families’ quality of life also would improve."
To help manage these patients, Strategic takes already existing disease state management protocols and tailors them to the patients’ needs.
"We use protocols that are approved and modified by physicians to serve the needs of that particular patient," she says. "For example, if a patient weighs only 100 pounds, we would adjust the protocols for the pain medication based on weight and the physician’s orders."
Monitoring the early hospital discharges
The second focus for Strategic is on early discharges from the hospital, such as after patients delivered babies or had surgery.
"Where patients used to stay in the hospital, now they have the opportunity to be monitored in the home," Schlachta says.
For these cases, Strategic employs some of the more portable, mobile telemedicine systems that operate over standard phone lines. The postoperative monitoring is short-term, usually about two to four weeks. "Its purpose is to provide patients with the support and the monitoring they need to get over their surgery."
Home telemedicine is an answer to the payers who want early discharges, the people who demand quality control, and the patients who are demanding attention, she adds. "You don’t want to be at home scared to death if you start to bleed four hours after a surgery. You have to have some type of recourse, and home telemedicine provides the opportunity to have around-the-clock health care attention and the appropriate care you need."
Home telemedicine also offers the opportunity to collect 24-hour outcomes data. Strategic collects the data for the agency and payer and also looks at patient satisfaction. Outcomes are another way telemedicine give agencies or payers a market advantage, Schlachta says. "[Telemedicine] is an additional service that is comprehensive and can be appealing and comforting to patients who often feel like they are being thrown out on the sidewalk in today’s health care environment."
[Editor’s note: For more information on Strategic Monitored Services, call (212) 996-6113.]
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