Vital Care Urgent Care is a walk-in urgent care clinic chain that provides comprehensive, fast, and affordable medical treatments for non-life-threatening conditions across West and Central Texas.
They use eMurmur auscultation software in combination with a digital stethoscope to provide routine exams remotely; enabling clinic staff to listen, visualize and record heart and lung sounds at one clinical location, while a qualified medical provider securely observes, reviews and diagnoses in real-time at another.
This innovative med-tech solution has enabled Vital Care to dynamically adjust their patient workload between clinics, optimize staffing during peak demand times / seasons, and maintain high quality service levels and patient satisfaction, all while keeping operational costs to a minimum and wait times low.
Vital Care offers walk-in urgent medical services across multiple medical disciplines and clinic locations. As a result, predicting and managing patient load and provider staffing—whether for routine or specialty services—can be administratively and logistically challenging and costly.
Vital Care often experiences high patient volumes at some clinic locations and times of year, and less at others, creating provider shortages or overload conditions, with high volume estimates reaching up to 80 patients / day during peak cold and flu season.
Finding cost effective solutions to help manage and balance provider workloads, and maintain the highest quality services, patient experience and satisfaction is a top priority for them.
In combination with a digital stethoscope, eMurmur software enables healthcare professionals to screen, monitor, diagnose, and consult on heart, lung, and bowel health, whether the patient is in clinic, in hospital, or at home.
eMurmur enables fast, reliable, accurate auscultation examinations for both live on-site and remote applications, it provides high-fidelity audio and wave visualization and recording. Ideal for routine in-clinic screening, telemedicine or for remote specialist consultations.
The Vital Care Team found the eMurmur software easy to learn and adopt into clinical practice, and has been successfully expanding its application to more clinics, locations and shifts.
They have implemented the use of technology in routine exams across their patient demographic spectrum, and found that patients are comfortable with the use of digital technologies for exams and that, children in particular, enjoy seeing the visual feedback from the software.
By taking advantage of remote digital health solutions like eMurmur, Vital Care clinics hope to be able to manage high patient volumes, across distributed locations by providing flexible, dynamic workflows options to their providers, while keeping the cost of service delivery low.
“eMurmur is part of a new service we’re implementing to better serve our patients, especially during the busier winter months when wait times can be a challenge. The ability to remotely listen and assess patients with high-quality audio has helped us manage patient flow more efficiently.
I’ve been on both sides of the equation: in the past, I’d have to travel across town to help another clinic or watch our end-of-day numbers remain uneven. With eMurmur, we can load balance in real time, offering help or receiving it as needed – without sacrificing quality of care. We hope this is a game-changer for improving access and optimizing our resources in the winter months to come.”
Heather Zamarron, Physician Assistant
Vital Care Urgent Care, TX USA
https://www.vitalcaretx.com/
