Telemedicine Is Keeping Children in School
Friday, March 11, 2011
Children miss fewer days of school and parents don’t have to miss work with remote medical consultations through the Health-e-Access Telemedicine program.
The Health-e-Access Telemedicine program, based at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Golisano Children’s Hospital, has helped reduce the number of missed school days for children and missed work days for parents.
Health-e-Access was launched in May 2001 to connect pediatric patients in child care centers, schools and community centers with their primary care providers at nearby pediatric and family medicine practices via the Internet. Health-e-Access features software that utilizes specialized cameras and an electronic stethoscope, allowing health care professionals to make a diagnosis, communicate findings, and prescribe treatments for sick children to school nurses—all without the child leaving school or the health care professional leaving the office.
The Health-e-Access program is the largest of its kind in the nation.
Kenneth McConnochie, M.D., M.P.H., is the program’s director and a professor of pediatrics at Golisano Children’s Hospital. He serves as the chief scientific officer of TeleAtrics, which supplies the hardware, support services and software — the TeleAtrics Connect™ system — that runs Health-e-Access.
The telemedicine program is reducing the number of missed classroom hours by diagnosing children without removing them from school. Parents are missing fewer workdays, because they don’t have to pick up their child from school to take him or her to the doctor. The Health-e-Access program is also lowering health care costs “by reducing expensive, time-consuming visits to the emergency department by over 20%,” according to Dr. McConnochie in an AHRQ podcast.
Dr. McConnochie and colleagues proved the benefits of the Health-e-Access program in 2008, when they analyzed data from 2006 to track pediatric visits to Rochester’s largest emergency department.
In a study of two groups of children — one that had access to a physician’s office, the ED and telemedicine and one that only had the first two choices — investigators found that the group with access to telemedicine sought care more often than the other group. However, trips to the ED were more than 20% less common in this group.
Of the 22,000 ED visits studied, nearly 28% could have been managed through telemedicine, which would have resulted in roughly 12,000 fewer ED visits that year, according to researchers. Dr. McConnochie and the researchers also believe telemedicine has the potential to not only lower health care costs for individuals, it could also benefit insurance companies.
Additionally, an AHRQ study of health IT from 2010 revealed that the cost of all illness visits was reduced by 3% since Health-e-Access began enrolling children.
The University of Rochester’s Health-e-Access Telemedicine program has flourished since 2001, in part thanks to U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality grants. You can listen to an interview with Dr. McConnichie about the program at AHRQ Healthcare 411. You can also view a short video featuring Dr. McConnichie on Youtube.