Telemedicine

Catholic Health Initiatives has more than 80 telemedicine programs that increase access to care for patients, minimize their need to travel to receive specialty care and alleviate health care workforce shortages.

CHI’s rural hospitals are using telemedicine to bring specialty care to their patients through real-time, two-way electronic communications.  For example:

• Rural hospitals in Minnesota and North Dakota have an experienced clinical pharmacist available 24 hours a day through CHI’s ePharmacist Direct service. Through a two-way video and audio link, a pharmacist at ePharmacist Direct’s 24-hour command center in Fargo, ND, can verify that the right medication, at the right dose, is being delivered to the right hospital patient at the right time.

• Through CHI’s teleradiology initiative, patients in rural hospitals can have their images read by fellowship-trained radiologists hundreds of miles away. For example, a woman getting a mammogram in a small town in North Dakota can have her images read by a radiologist in Des Moines in seconds, with the results returned to her and her physician in minutes.

Recently, the Helmsley Charitable Trust provided a grant of $2.4 million to help eight CHI hospitals in North and South Dakota use telemedicine to link with board-certified emergency room physicians around the clock.