A developmentally disabled teenager arrives in the emergency department with a temperature of 105 degrees. You mobilize the staff, diagnose and treat the patient, and send them home. The patient will be fine, but it’s a time-consuming, resource intensive, and extremely expensive visit. Not to mention the stress on the child.
This is the kind of challenging situation that caused James Powell, an internist in Long Island, to seek a telemedicine solution. Powell, who is the Chief Medical Officer at Long Island Select Healthcare in Suffolk County, New York, used a grant, and new MobileDoc technology from MedPod, to launch a program that enables him to improve care, extend his reach, and lower costs. Here’s Dr. Powell’s story.