![]() ![]() The hospital is well placed, he adds, for the full transition to a payment system based on efficiency and preserving wellness. Mercy can get its patients out of the hospital much faster than average, so it pockets the money it doesn’t need for longer stays, says Mercy Virtual President Randy Moore. A visit to the hushed carrels and blinking monitors is a glimpse into a future in which hospital systems are paid more when their patients are healthy, not sick.Įven now, Mercy Virtual is in the black, because of existing Medicare payment reforms that have already converted some of the agency’s payments into lump sums for treating specific illnesses. In the near future, the hospital’s administrators believe, instead of earning fees for each treatment administered, insurers and the government will pay Mercy Virtual to keep patients well. health care, such as using virtual communication to keep chronically ill patients at home as much as possible, and avoiding expensive hospitalizations that expose patients to more stress, infections and other dangers.īut perhaps the most important factor driving Mercy Virtual isn’t technology or new thinking but new payment systems. It is built on many of the new ideas gaining traction in U.S. Louis hospital in 2006, but got its own building and separate existence two years ago. The virtual care center started as an office in Mercy’s flagship St. The mess and the noise are on screens, visible in the hospital rooms the staffers peer into by video-in intensive care units far away, where patients are struggling for their lives, or in the bedrooms of homebound patients, whose often-tenuous existence they track with wireless devices. The result is a strange mix of hospital and office: Instead of bright fluorescent lighting, beeping alarms and the smell of chlorine, Mercy Virtual Care has striped soft rugs, muted conversation and a fountain that spills out one drop a minute. It's the product of converging trends in health care, including hospital consolidation, advances in remote-monitoring technology and changes in the way medicine is paid for. Mercy Virtual is arguably the world’s most advanced example of something gaining momentum in the health care world: A virtual hospital, where specialists remotely care for patients at a distance. ![]() The nurses wear scrubs, but the scrubs are very, very clean. Instead, doctors and nurses sit at carrels in front of monitors that include camera-eye views of the patients and their rooms, graphs of their blood chemicals and images of their lungs and limbs, and lists of problems that computer programs tell them to look out for. There’s one thing Mercy Virtual doesn’t have: beds. It has nurses and doctors and a cafeteria, and the staff spend their days looking after the very sick―checking their vital signs, recording notes, responding to orders and alarms, doing examinations and chatting with them. ![]() Louis, nestled among locust, elm and sweetgum trees, the Mercy Virtual Care Center has a lot in common with other hospitals. CHESTERFIELD, Mo.― Located off a superhighway exit in suburban St. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |