TelEmergency: a novel system for delivering emergency care to rural hospitals

Providing rural emergency medical care is often difficult because of limited resources and a scarcity of medical providers, including physicians trained in emergency medicine. Telemedicine offers promise for improving the quality of care in rural areas, but previous models were not well designed to provide affordable care to unstable or potentially unstable patients. The TelEmergency program was developed to overcome these limitations by providing quality, affordable medical care to patients in rural emergency departments (EDs) using specially trained nurse practitioners linked in real time by telemedicine with their collaborating physicians at the University of Mississippi Medical Center Adult Emergency Department. Since its inception in October 2003, the TelEmergency program has evaluated and treated more than 40,000 patients in 11 rural EDs throughout Mississippi, with a high degree of satisfaction from patients and hospital administrators. This article details the development and implementation of this system and describes the patient population that has been evaluated.