UAMS’ ER Doctors On Call at Chicot Memorial

In the UAMS Medical Center’s Emergency Department, Randy Maddox, M.D., the department’s medical director, works with an x-ray from Chicot Memorial Medical Center in Lake Village during a training session for Chicot Memorial staff.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences recently started a pilot program to provide telemedicine emergency services to Chicot Memorial Medical Center.

Under the program, which started Nov. 17, the UAMS Emergency Department doctors are available to offer video telemedicine consultations to the Lake Village hospital’s physicians on their patients.

Chicot Memorial ER doctors can call on UAMS 24 hours a day for advice or if they want an opinion about a treatment plan for a patient, said Dr. Rawle Seupaul, chairman of the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Emergency Medicine.

About three weeks into the program, however, the UAMS doctors haven’t had a single consultation, Seupaul said.

“But we’re reaching out to them to see if there are issues on their end,” he said. “Perhaps they felt like they didn’t want to bother us.”

David Mantz, the CEO of the 25-bed Chicot Memorial, didn’t return several calls. He praised the program in a UAMS news release, and said it “will give our physicians and staff access to the expertise available at UAMS for more complex and more rarely seen situations.”

The pilot program is expected to end in January. Seupaul said he will then review the data and move to expand the program to other hospitals. The services would be available to any facility that wants it, he said.

Seupaul said Chicot isn’t being billed for the consults now, but after the pilot program, UAMS will charge a monthly fee. A price hasn’t been determined yet, but it will depend on the size of the hospital and the number of consultations it might need.

UAMS’ emergency telemedicine model is based on the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, which has been providing the service for the past decade. It serves about 30 facilities and charges between $2,000 and $3,000 a month for the consultations, Seupaul said.

The roots of the pilot program can be traced to about a year ago when a group of UAMS leaders, including Dr. Casey Smolarz, an assistant professor at UAMS, approached Chicot administrators with the proposal for the service.

“We wanted to start off in a place that was in a rural location, but also had a small volume initially, so that if we had any kinks in the system, we would work that out,” Seupaul said.

He said the technology for the service was already in place thanks to a $102 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce awarded to UAMS in 2010 for the project, which cost $128 million.

“The technology already existed, so it didn’t cost us anything,” he said. “It cost us time and energy.”

UAMS uses telemedicine in other cases, such as for high-risk pregnancies and stroke patients.

Under the pilot program, the technology allows UAMS emergency room doctors to use stethoscopes to listen to the heart and lungs of a patient at Chicot Memorial or review a patient’s medical images while conducting a video conference with Chicot’s doctors.

If the program grows to include several hospitals, Seupaul said, he hopes that the doctors can be dedicated full time to providing the consultations. As it stands now, UAMS’ attending physicians at the UAMS Medical Center will handle the consultations with Chicot Memorial.

He said the patients outside of Little Rock will benefit under the program because they can receive treatment in their community and not have to drive several hours to UAMS for what turns out to be a short evaluation.

The program also could boost patient revenue at the community’s hospital, he said.

“What ends up happening is more patients in that community end up staying at that hospital,” Seupaul said. “The patients are happy because they feel comfortable and safe that their home institution can take care of them.”