Here’s an example:
A hospital located in the Midwest has an average daily census of 35 patients. The hospital has a hospitalist and NP during the day and utilizes call coverage at night. In using the call coverage at night, the hospital is experiencing fatigue on behalf of both the hospitalists and NPs and fears retention of these providers may be an issue and may be missing some night admissions. The hospital also has no full-time cardiologist on staff and given the nature of the patient population has to transfer almost all of the cardiology consults to another facility. In addition, with an aging patient population, the hospital would like the opportunity to start a stroke program and keep some of these patients local and in-house. What would be the telemedicine revenue? FInd out so you can start calculating the ROI for your hospital and patients?
Potential revenue elements:
- General medical patient retention
- Low acuity cardiology patient consultations
- General non-TPA patient retention
Use your telemedicine revenue retention calculation to find out incremental hospital revenue from having TeleNocturninst, TeleCardiology and Telestroke.
- For the TeleNocturnist service, you determine that you had roughly 50 ED transfers last year mainly as a result of having the call coverage at night and inability to properly assess the patient and keep patients in-house
- For TeleStroke coverage, you calculate you transferred approximately 3 patients a month or 36 for the year to other hospitals for stroke related symptoms
- In evaluating Cardiology, you estimate the hospital transferred about 110 patients given that cardiology specialties were not available
Based on these figures, your first step in calculating ROI shows revenue retention of approximately $598,900. A substantial amount for any hospital.
