“You don’t necessarily have to see your doctor physically,” Cunningham says. “You may have questions and can do a routine triage call with a nurse.”
Her practice, which has four doctors, has also found that nurses doing telehealth visits cut down on appointments “where that patient didn’t need to come in in the first place,” she says — issues such as medication reconciliation or instructions for taking insulin.
Cunningham expects nursing-assisted telehealth visits to continue, even as patients are starting to come back into LCMC Health offices. “It’s a really nice option,” she says.
Nurses Take Telemedicine Programs to the Next Level
Virtual care can also involve in-person communication.
Nurses employed by nursing homes and assisted living facilities, for example, are often the onsite source through which outside doctors can assess patients using telehealth, says Gregory Alexander, a professor of nursing at Columbia University and chair of nursing informatics leadership at the American Medical Informatics Association.
Nurses can handle the technology aspect of a video visit but also take and communicate patients’ vital signs. This has become especially helpful during the COVID-19 pandemic, Alexander says, “because you don’t want to expose somebody unnecessarily to infectious disease” by taking them to a doctor’s office or a hospital.
READ MORE: How are remote patient monitoring tools aiding the COVID-19 fight?
These kinds of virtual visits are “really trying to manage a population of patients in the community by using technology to beam in and use staff to help as liaisons to manage people in nursing homes,” he says.
That notion also works in reverse: At Banner Health, which has locations in multiple Western states, virtual nurses each can monitor 40 to 45 patients a day via telehealth, across three to six facilities in the region.
The capacity marks “a far shot from the five or six patients I could monitor as a bedside nurse in the past,” Alice Sneed, a critical care nurse who has been working in telehealth for eight years, wrote in a blog post for Philips, which makes the electronic intensive care unit software called eCareManager that Banner Health uses.
For hospitals without specialized ICUs, caretakers like Sneed are a critical link. “[O]ur virtual telehealth command center allows me to monitor patients remotely so these local care teams can keep the patient in their community hospital, rather than having to transport them four or five hours away to access higher-acuity care,” she writes.