Delivering specialty care to our families

St. Martin Hospital has partnered with Cardiovascular Institute of the South to provide cardio-telemedicine 24/7 to our patients. What is telemedicine? Telemedicine is the ability to remotely diagnose and treat patients using telecommunication technology.

We now have cardiologists and cardio nurse practitioners that round on our patients during the week, and after hours and on weekends, we have the same cardio nurse practitioners and cardiologists via telemedicine. This allows for our hospitalist and staff in our telemetry inpatient department to have immediate access to the cardiac specialists at all times. Telemedicine enables the hospitalist, staff, patients and families to speak directly to the cardiologist or nurse practitioner. The cardiologist can listen to the heart, lungs, talk with the patient and staff as well as perform a 12-lead EKG which gathers information from 12 different areas of the heart and show the cardiologist. Our patients and staff love this service!

Also, our telemedicine enables our teams to have a pulmonologist available as well. For the first time, St. Martin Hospital has a pulmonologist that holds clinic and rounds on his patients one day a week in Breaux Bridge and then is available via telemedicine. We can now admit our patients with COPD, pneumonia and other lung disorders and keep our patients close to home.

We also have telemedicine for cardiologists and neurologists for our emergency room physicians, staff and patients. This enables us to keep our patients at St. Martin Hospital rather than transfer out because we did not this specialty to care for our patients. And, it also assists the emergency room physician to have the subspecialty directing the appropriate care that may warrant a transfer to our main hospital in Lafayette is a higher level of care is warranted. Prior to our telemedicine program, we were transferring all of our cardiac patients out and pneumonia and COPD patients. Now, we can keep our families close to home with the highest level of care. We are now only transferring less than 23% of our emergency room visits at St. Martin Hospital. And, we have 100% patient satisfaction with our telemedicine program.

So, we know how telemedicine has assisted with taking healthcare outside the walls of the hospital in our school systems and now our parish jail commencing on July 1st; however, telemedicine has also delivered a higher level of care to our critical access hospital for our families. Again, St. Martin Hospital removing barriers and giving more access to healthcare in our rural communities.