NEW YORK, March 1, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- The same forces that are plaguing urban hospitals today – severe staff shortages from workers contracting COVID, nurse and physician burnout from the pandemic, overflowing emergency beds and underused medical-surgical beds – are even more profound at rural hospitals. They were already underserved by physicians before COVID, and lack the resources to deploy costly staffing agencies.

National initiative delivers an affordable and tailored telehealth solution for small hospitals and their unique needs

Telehealth is becoming a critical piece of the staffing solution across the nation, but rural hospitals struggle to pay for enterprise software designed primarily for large health systems, which have access to large information technology departments to implement them. Critical access and small community hospitals also lack staff with the expertise or time to take advantage of non-profit and state and federal grant funding for such initiatives.
To answer this challenge, two telehealth companies – Vitalchat and EQUUM Medical – and consumer electronics giant Samsung have joined forces on a project called Access4Health. Each represents a vital leg of the telehealth stool:

People: Equum Medical delivers remote care from the right provider at the right time, from intensive care to specialists to expert nurses, using whatever technology the hospital staff has.
Technology: Vitalchat delivers feature-rich telehealth securely through its lower-cost software, connecting caregivers, patients and families using existing workflows. The company has a number of affordable hardware options as well.
Funding: Samsung has a wealth of specialized resources that can help organizations identify eligibility and apply for a wide range of government and non-profit funding programs that target rural health access and health equity.
"Telehealth is the great equalizer in medicine, and it is needed to bring life-saving medical interventions in cases where the local hospital lacks specialists, which we find almost everywhere," said Corey Scurlock, MD, MBA, CEO of Equum. "The problem has been that a solution that is affordable and tailored to a small hospital's unique needs has proved elusive. Until now."

Added Ghafran Abbas, Vitalchat's CEO/CTO: "We know that if telehealth is to meet the needs of rural America, it needs be effortless for staff to use at a price that is actually affordable. We built a new software platform that can quickly and easily integrate into existing workflows, requires zero management from staff and gives physicians the freedom to virtually round on patients at will."

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