Hospital Services

SCTA partners quickly repurposed and expanded their telehealth technology infrastructure to provide high-quality inpatient care during the COVID-19 pandemic. McLeod Health and Prisma Health both increased their organizations’ technological capabilities to provide a greater breadth of inpatient telehealth consults, allowing for expanded specialty consults including pulmonology/ intensivist and infectious disease care to be deployed both within and across hospital sites.

Telehealth for Healthcare Worker Exposure Reduction

MUSC Health re-deployed existing telehealth equipment to remotely monitor COVID-positive and suspected COVID-positive patients in the inpatient and emergency department settings, decreasing the number of times care team members needed to enter these patients’ rooms. These inpatient telehealth programs collectively helped mitigate healthcare worker exposure and preserve precious PPE resources during a critical time.

MUSC’s Healthcare Worker Exposure Reduction program was estimated to save almost $190,000 in PPE in 2020.

Patient-Family Connection

Providing vital clinical care was not the only way that technology was deployed in the inpatient setting during the COVID-19 pandemic. As hospitals across SC limited visitation policies to help curb the spread of Coronavirus, people receiving in-patient care found themselves alone in their hospital rooms. To mitigate feelings of isolation and loneliness, telehealth teams at MUSC Health and McLeod Health assisted with the procurement of technology to facilitate a video connection so patients could have virtual visits with their loved ones.

Over 1,500 sessions connecting inpatients to family and friends took place in McLeod Health’s Family Connect program during 2020.