Why Would a Large Hospital Offer Telehealth Services for Its Employees

In a recent blog note, I discussed howTampa General Hospital was deploying advanced versions of telehealth kiosks in the hospital for its employees (see:Improvements in Telehealth Kiosks; Tampa General Deploys New Version for Employee Health). In response to the note,Dr. Brian Jackson, Medical Director, Business Development, IT, and Support Services atARUP submitted the following comment:This sounds like great technologies for locations where it wouldn't be cost-effective to put human providers.But this is in a hospital for heaven's sake! Why doesn't Tampa General just staff a walk-in clinic for employees? We do that at ARUP and it's extremely popular.This is a very reasonable question. I don't know what the official response from Tampa General Hospital (TGH) would be but let me weigh in with somepossible reasons that I have come up with:I feel fairly certain that TGH does already provides employee clinic services, a not unreasonable assumption for a health system with 1,000 beds and more than 8,000 employees. I will thus assume that the telehealth kiosks highlighted in the note are supplemental to the existing employee health clinics.I got the further impression from the article that TGH was partnering with the manufacturer of the kiosks,OnMed, to pilot these kiosks in the hospital in order to work out some of the potential technical kinks. The health system and OnMed seem to have bigger plans, post pilot, to install and staff the kiosks in sites such as ...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Tags: Diagnostics Healthcare Delivery Healthcare Innovations Hospital Executive Management Population Health Public Health Telemedicine Source Type: blogs