Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) has debuted Virtual Urgent Care, available to children and young adults up to age 21 who require after-hours care for non-emergency illness or injuries.

The service pairs patients with CHLA providers via video meeting from a computer, tablet or smartphone. 

Virtual Urgent Care will treat non-emergency illness and injuries, including fever, upper respiratory infections, vomiting, minor eye problems, allergies and minor injuries like bruises and scrapes. 

Providers of the telehealth service will provide discharge instructions, send prescriptions to pharmacies and, if needed, let patients and families know where and how to get continued care.

"Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is constantly working to implement practical, innovative solutions to enhance the patient family experience and improve access to care. Thanks to CHLA’s new Virtual Urgent Care service, families from all over California can receive world-class care from physicians at the top ranked pediatric hospital on the West Coast from the comfort of their own home," Omkar Kulkarni, chief transformation and digital officer at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, said in a statement.

THE LARGER TREND

According to the Department of Health and Human Services, telehealth visits increased by 154% during the COVID-19 pandemic and account for 30.2% of all healthcare visits. 

Another study by the Journal of Patient Experience, virtual urgent care visits reduced visit times from an average of 70 minutes to nine minutes. The same study also showed cost savings of an average of $90 for virtual visits versus in person urgent care visits. 

Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is the largest provider of hospital care for children in the state of California. 

In February, the hospital received $6 million from the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine to develop innovative stem cell approaches to treat children and adolescents with recurrent solid tumors. The research is geared towards reprogramming patient immune cells to target cancer cells by genetic changes in tumors. 

During the same month, CHLA unveiled a fetal cardiac care clinic for treating expecting mothers and fetal patients with congenital heart defects and heart diseases before birth. The clinic offers advanced imaging techniques such as 4D imaging and fetal cardiac MRI. 

Competitors in the virtual urgent care space include Wyoming-based TelMDFirst and healthcare giant CVS Health’s MinuteClinic.