Families in need of pediatric speciality care often wait months to get an in person appointment due to a shortage of pediatric subspecialists. Another barrier to getting specialist input is travel because most specialists are located in larger cities. In South Carolina, health care providers are removing these barriers through the use of electronic consultations or e-consults.
E-consults are electronic, provider to provider communications that allow a primary care physician to consult directly with a specialist within the secure electronic medical record system.
Dr. Rachael Zweigoron is the medical director of pediatric ambulatory telehealth at the Medical University of South Carolina. E-consults have become very helpful for her as she cares for patients in North Charleston. She said the workflow for using e-consults within the electronic medical record is easy. She searches for which specialist she needs to connect with, submits a clinical question and then waits for a reply. Answers are delivered sometimes the same day, or one to two days later.
“The really cool thing about e-consults at MUSC is that we have a lot of our specialists participating,” Dr. Zweigoron said. “We have Pediatric dermatology, pediatric pulmonary medicine, developmental pediatrics, hematology, oncology, pediatric endocrinology, and infectious disease.”
Dr. Stephen Thacker is a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital. He said e-consults provide more equitable access to sub-speciality care especially for problems that might not necessarily require an in person visit.
“What I see as the benefit of e-consult and coordinated care is it allows providers to give subspecialty care in that medical home, in that community where those folks live, rather than waiting on really long referral times for questions that could be answered quickly,” Dr. Thacker said. “And it allows us to really target those in person visits for folks that are going to benefit most from it.”
