Mayo Clinic pilots telemedicine kiosks to provide quality access to healthcare.
The proliferation of retail clinics such as those at Target, Walgreens and CVS has spurred discussion in the healthcare industry around ease of access and the benefits of close-to-home healthcare.
Now, though, access to primary care could be even closer than the corner store. With telemedicine kiosks, consumers can receive consultations right at work.
Telemedicine kiosks are transportable stations that are equipped with video consulting technology; essentially, a portable physician office.
HealthSpot has gained traction as one of the fastest growing telemedicine kiosk vendors, with healthcare organizations such as the Cleveland Clinic, Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente and, most recently, Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic partnering with HealthSpot to provide care for consumers using the kiosks.
Mayo Clinic employed a kiosk at its Austin, Minn., location in early October as a pilot program called Mayo Clinic Health Connection. The kiosk was placed on one of the floors in the family practice clinic, and clinic, hospital and medical center employees and their dependents on the Mayo health plan can use the kiosk to consult with a provider who is scheduled to be staffing the Mayo Clinic Health Connection.
Mark Ciota, M.D., CEO of Mayo Clinic Health System in Albert Lea and Austin, says a group of physicians at the Austin campus were interested in testing this type of telemedicine pilot after receiving requests from local businesses and certain patient populations. "We want to try to reduce healthcare cost and expenses but still have access in ways we have not had before," he says.
Though Mayo Clinic is piloting the program, the health system hopes to deploy the kiosks to other local employers.
"If you think of it from the employer's standpoint, we can place one of these kiosks into their environment, whether it’s a corporate headquarters or a plant, and that allows employees to access healthcare without leaving their place of employment," Dr. Ciota says. "Just by not having to leave, you would think the productivity could be maintained or reduced to a lesser degree. It should be much more efficient for employees to come to the kiosk, be seen and go back to work."
This ease of offering is exactly the goal HealthSpot had in mind when developing the platform.
"We developed HealthSpot as a cloud-based telemedicine platform with the endpoint as the kiosk being an alternative for offering a more robust feature set," says HealthSpot CEO Steve Cashman. "There are a handful of venues where that's really important, and employer clinics are a huge market segment."
What's more, HealthSpot's telemedicine kiosk is designed to extend providers' reach of care as well as ensure their patients are receiving thorough, adequate consultations. HealthSpot is not just a video conferencing module. Each kiosk is equipped with diagnostic tools such as blood pressure cuffs, magnascopes (a dermascope with expanded clinical use cases), otoscopes and stethoscopes that patients can use, the information of which are transmitted back to the consulting physician.
"This is a step up from just a Skype call," Mr. Cashman says. "Most doctors you meet with want to meet the standard of care, and that means they have to look in your ear if they think you have an ear infection or take your vitals in an FDA-approved manner. The reason we developed [HealthSpot] was to get the efficiency that came with telemedicine and to provide access to high quality care from sources consumers can trust."
Additionally, all patient information is secure and confidential and is entered into a patient's EMR following their consultation at Mayo Clinic Health Connection.
Both Mr. Cashman and Dr. Ciota — as well as many industry professionals across the country — see telemedicine as a growing presence that is positioned to impact the future, and kiosks are taking telemedicine offerings to the next level.
"We think this is the next step of telemedicine," says Dr. Ciota. "There are apps on your phone and certain websites where you can access information, but this is a real-time, interactive exchange of information and an exam that ends up with a diagnosis and a treatment….Once these became popular, it allows you to access healthcare just about anywhere, and that's just not possible today."
More articles on telemedicine:
Making more of app-based medicine: HealthTap takes next steps
The human touch of telemedicine: A primer on secure, reliable, patient-centric telemedicine solutions
10 statistics on the current use of telemedicine in hospitals, health systems