America’s dependence on the Emergency Department (ED) across all types of communities shows no signs of abating. It is where our system offers universal care. QLER is acutely attuned to this situation as our team of psychiatrists is working in dozens of ED’s via our telehealth solution on any given hour of any given day.
The typical American ED is a place filled with stress as the range of patients and their needs is persistently complex, expensive, and unfunded. This demand to be all things to all people while continually being pressured to do more with less resources means the caregivers in the ED live their lives with levels of stress far above the average for the rest of us.
It is imperative that those with resource-granting and decision-making authority do all they can to ease this overload of stress in the ED. At QLER, we see a few moves that can be made with telehealth.
- Reduce ED demand and expand access with virtual care in your community. Telehealth eliminates the need to travel, sit in crowded waiting rooms, or navigate complex medical facilities. Use a robust telehealth program to intercept patients that don’t need to be seen in the ED. By reducing the denominator of potential patients undergoing these stressors, the population of patients arriving at the ED will be smaller and more manageable reducing overall stress on the system and in the system.
- Leverage telehealth for specialties that the ED will need. A program of timely intervention across relevant specialties can assist the care process, eliminate guessing, and reduce stress for your ED physicians and nurses. Take away the pressure on these caregivers to guess in the absence of a specialist, by making them available with a dependable telehealth specialty program.
- Optimize and rationalize the treatment of mental health patients in the ED with a robust on demand telepsychiatry program. By partnering with an organization like QLER on a long-term basis, an ED can consistently accept, treat, and disposition mental health patients within a few hours at any time of day. When leadership establishes proactive standards for telepsychiatry consultation on ED mental patients, caregivers immediately receive support in their diagnosis and care plan which reduces stress immediately.
- Improve the ED environment with lower length of stay and appropriate discharge rates on the mental health population. Not only do caregivers reduce stress with support on how to treat these patients but also a competent and comprehensive on demand telepsychiatry program for the ED will reduce length of stay, improve admission decisions, and raise the discharge rate (with appropriate medical rationale) for the volatile and out of place population of ED mental health patients. Fewer of these patients boarding for less time means reduced disruption, burden, and stress for the work of the ED team.
QLER Telepsychiatry is a large psychiatry group focused on leading telepsychiatry in America’s emergency departments. Our growth over seven years gives QLER the horsepower and economy of scale to proactively partner and manage your difficult ED mental health population 24/7/365. Our long-term partnerships and 99% retention rate with our ED customers allow us to typically halve the ALOS of ED mental patients and raise their discharge rate by 30-40 percent.
