BATESVILLE, Ark. – White River Medical Center critical care staff recently attended the 2016 Baptist Health eICU® care Collaborative Conference: Partnering with You for Improved Patient Care in Little Rock to learn how telehealth services can improve patient access to care, especially for gravely ill patients.
WRMC was one of 15 hospitals from across the state to participate in the conference held Friday, Aug. 26, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. In addition to three local Little Rock hospitals, other participating medical centers were represented from Magnolia, Clarksville, Searcy, Harrison, Crossett, Malvern, Arkadelphia, Stuttgart, Heber Springs, Conway, North Little Rock and Fort Leonard Wood, MO.
Wendy Deibert, RN, BSN and CEO/founder of The VirtualEngine, LLC., was the key note speaker at the conference. Wendy spent 30 years in nursing as a bedside clinician, manager, senior consultant and vice president. Most recently, she worked at Mercy hospital as the vice president of telehealth services. During her time at Mercy, she developed a telehealth team and converted more than 500 critical care/step-down beds to eICU technology at 15 plus hospitals across five states. She launched 30 telestroke site programs, developed a telesepsis program that monitors over 3,000 beds and created the first eAcute/eHospitalist across three hospitals. As part of this transformation of care at Mercy, and with the use of telehealth technology, she led the design of the world’s first virtual care center in Chesterfield, Missouri, which opened a year ago in August.
Other information shared at the event included topics such as using technology to improve patient care; using telehealth to drive outcomes; and breakout sessions about improving critical care patient outcomes for ambassadors, leaders and IT staff.
Three years ago WRMC partnered with Baptist Health to give their patients an additional team of specialists to watch over them 24/7. WRMC has two critical-care rooms with eICU technology equipped with a camera, microphone, and speaker that enables staff in the control center and WRMC caregivers at the bedside and patients to communicate with each other in real time. “Cockpit-like sensors” of this advanced telemedicine technology enables the eICU care staff to detect even the slightest change in the patient’s condition and therefore reduce the time between problem identification and intervention by the bedside team. Staffed round-the-clock, 365 days of the year, the Baptist Health eICU care clinical operations hub located in Little Rock helps rural hospitals like WRMC provide state-of-the-art intensive care to its sickest patients.
As the leader in healthcare, Baptist Health has been delivering quality care to Arkansans for more than 80 years. And as the state’s most comprehensive healthcare system, Baptist Health provides more than 175 points of access including nine hospitals – all committed to delivering “All Our Best” to the people of Arkansas and beyond.