take a patient out to see a health care provider, telehealth allows the nurses to
be able to get specialty consultations, therefore, saving a lot of trouble for
patients as well as money. In ambulatory care, especially like in
Critical Access Hospitals where they have clinics, they may not have specialists.
So they may actually have telehealth where you can get like dermatology
consultation, neurological consultation, and so on.
And in hospital stroke care is provided, where people may not be really
experienced or frequently see patients with evolving strokes.
And so,being able to get consultation from such as University of Minnesota is
helpful. In prison settings, they're doing some
work with the use of telehealth for our psychiatric consults.
So if you think about taking a patient out with guards to go see a psychiatrist,
it gets to be very expensive and this allows them to be able to receive better
more frequent services within the prison settings.
And then we also see where there are nurses who are wound care specialists.
And they use telehealth to be able to provide consultations about, you know,
staging pressure ulcers or what's the best kind of treatment for pressure
ulcers. ICU monitors is another issue where we
have what we call eICUs. So we'll have ICUs that can be monitored
from a central location. And you can have 15, 18, 30, 100 ICUs
across the country where nurses who are very experienced in the central location
can actually provide monitoring for ICUs. And then, also, we see telehealth used
for health promotion. So helping people with obesity, for
instance, to be able to do a better job of complying with diets or exercise.
So as we look at what is the role then of a telehealth nurse?
Well one is called a presenter, and a presenter is someone who actually sets up
the equipment, lines up the appointment, tests the equipment schedules the
patients, brings them in, does an initial assessment, and then presents them over
telehealth to a specialist on the other end.
Another type of role is the nurse case manager.
So we're seeing an increasing number of nurses working in roles in order to be
able to help manage chronic diseases like diabetes or support health promotion.
Public health nurses are also using telehealth.
So you'll find that Text4bbies or Text2Quit smoking are two examples of
telehealth. So telehealth isn't always video, it can
be other kinds of technologies. Health coaching is another role and then
the Tele-ICU nursing that I mentioned earlier.
And then also because of the fact that the roles for telehealth are expanding so
much, we actually see coordinators who are specializing in coordinating a group
of telehealth nurses. So this is really an upcoming role that
you'll be seeing in the future. Now, an example of what does a nurse
presenter do? Well, the first thing that they have to
do is actually plan the program. So one of the examples is what room do
you actually put a telehealth equipment in?
And it needs to be in a quiet area where you're not hearing the paging overhead,
for example. and it needs, you need to look at the
scheduling coordination, not just in the local place, but also with the specialist
who's on the other end so you're doing dual scheduling.
evaluating and preparing the equipment, making sure it's located in the right
place so it's easily accessible without blocking the monitoring of the patient.
Assessing the patient, presenting, what are the findings?
And then facilitating remote exams. You're going to see various kinds of
equipment like derm camera, where you can get a camera right up next to a person's
hand, and be able to see the texture of the skin, the color, and so on.
as well as things like listening to heart sounds, you know, looking in their ears,
looking in their throats. So there's various types of equipment
that's used for the specialist on the other end to be able to actually see what
the nurse on the end with the patient is seeing.
And then documentation afterwards and scheduling the follow up care with the
patient. Now, there are different kinds of
telehealth. So, one is called real time, in which it
might be just the use of a telephone as an example.
Or you might have web consults, where it's two-way audio and visual, so that
there's an interaction that's going on. And you might find that you're either
using peripheral devices like I mentioned a stethoscope or no peripheral devices.
So there are different levels of technicality in the equipment.
There also is something called store and forward.
So what that means is that you may have images such as x-rays or audio or video
types of images that can be stored. And then, they can be forwarded to
somebody for specialty consultation as well.
Or you might see a combination of those where an x-ray was done ahead of time,
but then, you've got a real time person there and you also are looking at store
and forward images from previous times. So one of the things that is really
interesting is the variety of different equipment that is used in telehealth.
So phone lines, obviously and internet are critical in, in order to be able to
do telehealth. you know, looking at phones and
computers, and the computers can be either with camera or without camera and
microphones. cellphones are being used, life lines,
sensor technology and various kinds of peripheral devices.
So those are listed on the right hand of the slide here, and so you can see that
there are different kinds of peripheral devices, like blood pressure scales,
glucose monitoring cardiac monitoring dermascope, otoscopes, and pedometers.
The thing that's important about that is the information is collected locally and
it's transmitted remotely so that the person on the other end can actually,
it's like they're in the room with you when you're using the equipment.
So here's some examples of that. On the left upper hand corner, you'll see
that there is a General Exam Camera. I saw the use of it the other day where
they got right down and you could see every, it's like watching the fairies
dancing on the head of a pin, you know, you can see such good clarity.
the PhysioGlove is actually EKG monitoring.
So you just simply just put it on the person's chest and be able to get EKG per
that is remotely communicated. And with the Electronic Stethoscope, the
person on the other end can hear every single heart and breath sound through the
equipment. You'll also see Spirometers for measuring
people's ability to breathe. The Ophthalmoscope for looking at their
eyes, and then the ENT/Otoscope as well for looking in ears.
Additional equipment that you'll see are Portable Ultrasound or
Nasopharyngoscopes, so being able to look inside someone's nose to be able to do an
examination. Now, I'm going to switch from equipment
to talking a bit about some of the types of technology.
So, as I mentioned earlier on, you can be very simple, like a phone or even email
consults, provided that you're doing it securely, and that's the whole nature of
this. Or you can have a [UNKNOWN] complex, as
looking at an eICU. An example of that is that Baptist
Hospital has eight ICUs for a total of 142 beds that are remote, remotely
monitored from a single location. So there are four nurses every shift, and
one of the things to note is that this is not an entry level position.
These are nurses with an average of 19 years of experience.
And they are able to do real time vital signs and cardiac monitoring.
They can and see the entire electronic health record.
They can do alerts if there is a problem, so they can notify the nursing station,
immediately be able to get help for the patient.
And they can actually activate a camera and be able to speak to the person in the
patient's room. So obviously, patients need to be
oriented when their TV comes on and they see a person in front of them, you know,
that that is really a nurse from a remote location who's monitoring them.
As we look at the future and actually kind of the present, we're beginning to
see that Mr. Smith's House is calling.
The technology that we have in the community is beginning to help us be able
to really support people to stay safely in the community, but also, to be able to
gather information that a health care provider can help to be able to monitor
what's going on for them. So there's caregiver alerts.
So, an example is the lifeline that's been around for many years.
There are also are voice prompts to remind people.
an example of that is, especially with medication management, there are many
devices now that remind people that it's time to take your medication.
And in fact, if they don't take their medication number of the devices are set
up to actually call whoever they designate as the person.
And so, in 30 minutes, if you haven't taken your medication, I'm calling your
doctor or I'm calling your nurse or I'm calling your daughter.
So oftentimes, it's an informal caregiver who gets called.
There are floor sensors. so what you'll find is that somebody who
has problems with ambulation, is at risk for falling, you can actually pick up you
know, their, their step, their gait, as they're walking and notice if there's
anything different. And so it's it's kind of early stage yet,
but there's a lot of work going on in assisted living situations.
To use that as kind of early warning detectors, that when dates begin to
change, or for people walking, that it might mean something else is going on.
there are safety features that are, in homes, like you'll find in Alzheimer's
units. There are different kinds of monitoring
devices that are sensory. there are also video monitoring, vital
sign monitoring and even smart beds. So an example of a smart bed is there is
pad that fits underneath the sheet that will pick up early detection of moisture,
wake the patient up so they get up and go to the bathroom before they actually are
incontinent. And incontinence is a leading cause for
people not to be able to remain at home. So this has become a really helpful kind
of thing. Now, this one is more futuristic.
When you look at all the robots, I haven't seen a robot that will go around
and vacuum your floor that looks like this but we do actually have robots now
that vacuum floors. On commercials, you may have seen these
small round disks that go around and vacuum up floors.
I haven't seen one who'd do the grocery shopping yet, but that'd actually be
really great when that happens at some point in the future.
As we think about telehealth, it's critical to also always pay attention to
the ethical and to the legal issues. So if you take a look at, there's a
couple of different scope and standards of practice.
One is put out by the AAACN, so I'm not sure I remember what that stands for, but
it's a telehealth association. There are standards and guidelines from
nursing as well as from the telehealth groups.
There are also some standards out in regards to devices in particular.
It's really critical in telehealth. So the is the center for Telehealth and
eHealth Law that will you, will be a good resource for trying to understand the
legal issues around telehealth. And then there's the license to practice.
So, the location of the patient is where you need to be licensed.
Minnesota is not part of the compact states for instance.
And a compact state means that if I have a license here and I'm part of a compact,
I am licensed to practice in other states.
So if a patient I want to monitor lives in Wisconsin, but I'm a nurse in
Minnesota, I can not provide telehealth in Wisconsin.
So it's really critical to understand where you're licensed to practice.
There is a lot of research that is out and continues to rapidly unfold about the
benefits, as well as the challenges with telehealth.
So the benefits really are about health care access.
Especially, in remote rural or urban areas.
there is a beginning return on a dollar dollars that's beginning to be
demonstrated now through a number of different grants.
Certainly coordination of care is really key.
especially when you think about home care or case management.
Being able to make sure that somebody is center with the patient and then gets
other people involved as is needed. And then we're seeing that the quality of
care can greatly improve because of the followup that can occur with patients.
There are some challenges though of telehealth.
Certainly it's been slow to expand and mainly because of reimbursement, but the
reimbursement issues are beginning to shift now that we're demonstrating the
benefit and the financial return. We're beginning to see more payers
willing to actually pay for telehealth visits.
in rural area, the technical infrastructure continues to be a
challenge. There are areas that do not have cable,
for instance or fiber optic and they're still using what's called POTS lines,
plain old telephone system lines. licensure and credentialing still needs
to be attended to. And we need to continue to gather the
evidence that telehealth really does make a difference.