Dive Brief:
- St. Louis-based Mercy health system, one of the nation's largest Catholic health systems, is building a 120K-square foot facility designed to house all of its telemedicine initiatives in a single building.
- The $50-million facility, which will open next year, will be home to 300 employees, including doctors, nurses, researchers and support staffers.
- Mercy officials say that services improving certain types of care will be especially valuable—such as telemedicine solutions to speed sepsis recognition and treatment, which could cut mortality by 50% or more and lower costs per case by over $8,000.
Dive Insight:
Mercy sees the telemedicine center not only as a chance to improve care within its system, but also as a potential source of outside revenue as well. Execs say that over time, smaller hospitals and systems that don't have the size and economies of scale to build their own virtual centers will turn to Mercy for such services.
Not only that, the system's leaders expect to leverage the data the telemedicine center collects to improve the quality of care the system provides. Applying analytics to this growing volume of virtual patient data will allow Mercy to evolve algorithms that result in better outcomes, they say.