Hospitals will have access to specialized physicians around the nation in real-time through virtual telehealth
Bluestream Health, the virtual care company designed to power healthcare providers, today announced a strategic partnership with the Region 1 Disaster Health Response System (RDHRS) to provide telehealth services during disasters or public health emergencies.
The RDHRS is a tiered system that builds upon and unifies existing assets within States and across regions to support a more coherent, comprehensive and capable disaster health response system able to respond to 21st-century health security threats. When a disaster strikes, patients need their healthcare system to be ready to respond. However, previous large-scale disasters, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, have shown that effective functioning during a crisis challenges even the most prepared healthcare systems, communities and jurisdictions.
The Region 1 RDHRS aims to address gaps in access to specialty care by creating a national network of experts available to provide real-time clinical advice via video consultants during large-scale, no-notice events or public health emergencies. Bluestream Health’s telehealth platform supports these efforts by seamlessly providing access to clinical experts from any location, at any time – virtually – ensuring the best possible care for patients during disasters or catastrophic events.
Bluestream Health will provide Region 1 RDHRS with its intuitive and flexible, HIPAA-compliant virtual care telehealth platform, which combines secure video with medical workflows across the care continuum. Clinicians can easily submit specialty consultation requests and remote clinical experts can then provide essential clinical advice to assist in the triage and/or treatment of patients via Bluestream Health’s easy to use, device-agnostic, video platform.
As the global COVID-19 pandemic began to spread in early 2020, the Region 1 RDHRS team raced to discover an easy-to-use, lightweight, device-agnostic platform. Bluestream Health’s technology fits the bill in a comprehensive and innovative way. Bluestream Health was able to effectively configure their existing system for pilot implementation by the RDHRS to support COVID-19 patients in Massachusetts. This pilot implementation provided valuable insight into platform performance, ease of use and system feasibility during disasters.
Building on the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pilot, the Region 1 RDHRS conducted a mass casualty simulation in collaboration with Boston Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the American Burn Association. This simulation enabled the team to test the speed and effectiveness of the disaster telemedicine platform, as well as the notification and mobilization processes to evaluate how quickly the RDHRS disaster telehealth platform could be utilized to rapidly mobilize burn experts in real-time to support a large-scale burn event.
“We were able to demonstrate to MGH and Boston Medical Center users that our platform has the ability to provide immediate access to expert care by deploying and activating a network of specialty physicians across the nation in real-time,” said Brian Yarnell, co-founder and president, Bluestream Health. “Using Bluestream Health’s technology, the RDHRS is able to essentially create a virtual center of excellence in the disaster health industry – connecting experts around the country who would normally not be accessible to deliver patient care due to geographic location, time zones or other issues.”
About Bluestream Health
Bluestream Health is a provider for telehealth to healthcare providers and health systems. Its virtual care platform provides health systems, clinics and, third-party providers with a low-cost way to build, deploy, and manage complex clinical workflows.
