Why Would a Large Hospital Offer Telehealth Services for Its Employees

In a recent blog note, I discussed how Tampa General Hospital was deploying advanced versions of telehealth kiosks in the hospital for its employees (see: Improvements in Telehealth Kiosks; Tampa General Deploys New Version for Employee Health). In response to the note, Dr. Brian Jackson, Medical Director, Business Development, IT, and Support Services at ARUP submitted the following comment:

This sounds like great technologies for locations where it wouldn't be cost-effective to put human providers. But this is in a hospital for heaven's sake! Why doesn't Tampa General just staff a walk-in clinic for employees? We do that at ARUP and it's extremely popular.

This is a very reasonable question. I don't know what the official response from Tampa General Hospital (TGH) would be but let me weigh in with some possible reasons that I have come up with:

• I feel fairly certain that TGH does already provides employee clinic services, a not unreasonable assumption for a health system with 1,000 beds and more than 8,000 employees. I will thus assume that the telehealth kiosks highlighted in the note are supplemental to the existing employee health clinics.
• I got the further impression from the article that TGH was partnering with the manufacturer of the kiosks, OnMed, to pilot these kiosks in the hospital in order to work out some of the potential technical kinks. The health system and OnMed seem to have bigger plans, post pilot, to install and staff the kiosks in sites such as airports and colleges. 
• I will further assume that it may sometimes be difficult to schedule an appointment in TGH's employee clinics on a urgent basis. It may thus be more efficient, particularly in a hospital with a large physical footprint, to provide health services to employees on the decentralized basis that telemedicine kiosks enable.
• Finally, here's the last sentence in my blog note cited above: For me, the most limiting factor in the growth of virtual visits is the number of healthcare professionals trained to use the technology. The internal deployment of kiosk(s) at TGH provides an ideal training environment for hospital health professionals to learn how to provide care efficiently in this new "virtual" environment. 

Putting all of this together, the TGH telemedicine project seems to be an example of strategic business planning rather than one driven by operational requirements.