Here are five things to know:
1. The three hospitals will serve as hubs in the traditional “hub and spoke” telemedicine platform. Each will connect with regional sites, enabling the hospital’s orthopedic and neuromusculoskeletal specialists to connect via video with children and their parents.
2. Kevin Martin, administrator for the Shriners Hospital for Children in Salt Lake City, said the health system chose orthopedics for its pilot project because of the scarcity of specialists in the country.
3. Due to the complicated nature of orthopedic visits, each partner site will need a clinician on hand to guide the patient through an exam.
4. To test the platform, the three Shriners hospitals recently connected some of their patients with Santa Claus.
5. Nationally, children’s hospitals are among the leaders in adopting telemedicine services, owing to the difficulty of traveling to appointments for children and their parents and the limited numbers of pediatric physicians and specialists.
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