COVER STORY
EMBRACING TELEMEDICINE
Piggott Community Hospital Serving as National Model by Nancy Robertson, Senior Editor
That a rural Northeast Arkansas Critical Access Hospital is a national leader in the practice of telemedicine may, on its face, seem surprising. That the hospital is Piggott Community Hospital, long known for its strategy of connecting with a wide variety of partners to increase health care access for its patients, removes the element of surprise. In fact, “of course!” is a predicted response.
P
iggott Community Hos-
care. “Telemedicine was the obvious
its longtime Executive
access to specialty care,” Magee says.
pital (PCH) is guided by Director James Magee,
a leader who believes in
seeking patient care access through any and all avenues.
“As a community-owned hospital, we
are not limited to any one system in the partnerships we can generate,” Magee says. “So to benefit our patients, we
participate in as many programs as possible – whether conventional or uncon-
ventional and across a broad spectrum
– to best meet the needs of the patients we serve.”
Initial logic for the development
of the Telemedicine Program was
that many of the area’s elderly and
financially challenged did not have the capability and/or resources to travel to
distant locations for physician specialty 12 . SUMMER 2017
mechanism to dramatically increase There are many avenues of
telemedicine being employed at PCH. For example, the hospital is a beta
site for a Tele-Emergency program
with UAMS, whereby an emergency department physician at PCH can connect with a Board-Certified
Emergency Medicine physician for a consult on a complex care issue.
But it is one program, especially,
that moves the hospital into the national limelight.
That is the collaboration with Innova-
tor Health and the use of its remarkable telemedicine delivery system, “the
Rounder,” which allows patients to
build incredibly close relationships with their physicians – even those remotely located.
ANATOMY OF THE ROUNDER The Rounder is a more than six-foot
tall apparatus that looks like a 55-inch television, upended to vertical, and
made portable by putting it on wheels.
It’s the brainchild of Dr. Darren Sommer, DO, MBA, MPH, a true believer in the
necessity of building doctor/patient re-
lationships even absent the face-to-face experience.
“Our goal is to deliver telemedicine
experiences that are so rich and natural
that neither the patient nor their caregiv-
er ever sees the distance that separates them,” he says.
The Rounder functions as a life-sized
connector between physicians and their patients. Besides the screen that brings patient and physician together, the
Rounder has a nurse-operated workstation, which includes HIPAA-compliant