Tele-emergency services provide immediate and synchronous audio/video connections, most commonly between rural low-volume hospitals and an urban "hub" emergency department. We performed a systematic literature review to identify tele-emergency models and outcomes. We then studied a large tele-emergency service in the upper Midwest. We sent a user survey to all seventy-one hospitals that used the service and received 292 replies. We also conducted telephone interviews and site visits with ninety clinicians and administrators at twenty-nine of these hospitals. Participants reported that tele-emergency improves clinical quality, expands the care team, increases resources during critical events, shortens time to care, improves care coordination, promotes patient-centered care, improves the recruitment of family physicians, and stabilizes the rural hospital patient base. However, inconsistent reimbursement policy, cross-state licensing barriers, and other regulations hinder tele-emergency implementation. New value-based payment systems have the potential to reduce these barriers and accelerate tele-emergency expansion.

Although only used in 3.5% of ED encounters on average, our findings provide evidence that tele-emergency activation is well reasoned and related to those situations when extra expert assistance is particularly beneficial.

Introduction Tele-emergency can address several challenges facing emergency departments in rural areas. The purpose of this paper is to (a) examine the rates of avoided transfers in rural emergency departments that adopted tele-emergency applications; and (b) estimate the costs and benefits of using tele-emergency to avoid transfers. Methods Analysis is based on 9048 tele-emergency encounters generated by the Avera eEmergency programme (Sioux Falls, South Dakota) in 85 rural hospitals across seven states between October 2009-February 2014. For each non-transfer patient, physicians indicated whether the transfer was avoided because of tele-emergency activation. The cost-benefit analysis is conducted from the hospital, patient and societal perspectives, and includes technology costs, local hospital revenues and patient-associated savings. All monetary values are expressed in US$. Sensitivity analysis is conducted by examining the worst and best case scenarios of costs, revenues and savings. Results In these analyses, 1175 avoided transfers were attributed to tele-emergency. From a rural hospital perspective, tele-emergency costs around US$1739 to avoid a single transfer. However, tele-emergency saves around US$5563 in avoided transportation and indirect patient costs. Combining these, from a societal perspective, tele-emergency has the potential to result in a net savings of US$3823 per avoided transfer while accounting for tele-emergency technology costs, hospital revenues, and patient-associated savings. Conclusion This study highlights various stakeholder perspectives on the financial impact of tele-emergency in avoiding patient transfers in rural emergency departments. Telemedicine has the potential to reduce the number of transfers of emergency department patients and generate some revenue for rural hospitals despite associated technology costs, while incurring substantial patient savings.

Rural provider participation in ACOs will require collaboration among rural providers and with larger, often urban, health care systems. Rural providers should strengthen their negotiation capacities by developing rural provider networks, understanding large health system motivations, and adopting best practices in clinical management. Rural communities should generate programs that motivate their populations to achieve and maintain optimum health status. Policy makers should develop rural-relevant ACO-performance measures and provide necessary technical assistance to rural providers and organizations.