St. Joseph Health System, a $4.6 billion Catholic healthcare organization, with facilities in California, Texas and New Mexico, is expanding its telehealth initiative to deliver remote care from any internet enabled device.

St. Joseph Health System will use Emerge.MD's OnePlace virtual clinic to support the pilot project to expand into other remote care services such as in-home, mobile, urgent, on call and specialty care services.

"We are very excited to enter into this relationship with Emerge.MD, which will extend our ability to deliver high quality healthcare to the communities we serve, with particular attention to addressing the needs of the underserved and vulnerable populations," said Elliot Sternberg, MD, executive vice president of wellness and health improvement at St. Joseph Health System.

This interactive solution will enable patients and physicians in distinct locations to seamlessly participate in virtual visits by automating existing workflows into a virtual environment making it so that everyone can easily participate in the care cycle. Under this agreement, St. Joseph Health System will use Emerge.MD's OnePlace virtual clinic as the workflow environment in support of both physical modular units such as its telepresence kiosks as well as mobile carts, tablets and desktop PCs using traditional web cameras.

The project will be rolled out in the next several months in various Southern California locations including physician and patient sites, beginning with in-home visits as well as enabling a telestroke program between St. Mary's, one of St. Joseph's rural hospitals and Mission Hospital, which operates a neurology center of excellence.

"Access to critical care services is a challenge in rural communities such as ours,” said James Kyle, MD, vice president medical affairs St. Mary's Medical Center. “The OnePlace virtual clinic allows us to continue to extend the reach of our hospitals by connecting specialists from across our system to the bedside in our emergency department and critical care units.”

The project is part of St. Joseph’s continuing efforts to leverage technology in support of the system’s Healthiest Communities Initiative in which standardized care can be delivered across the system insuring that the needs of patients who experience financial, social, and geographic limitations in particular experience no barriers to accessing care and receiving the best outcomes.