Beilinson Medical Center in Petach Tikva has opened a new virtual hospital that is intended to expand and improve Israel’s remote medical care.
A wide array of online medical services are being offered by the new hospital, “Beilinson NEXT,” to anyone in Israel with a referral and a Form 17 payment authorization, regardless of their healthcare service provider.
A high-risk patient who needs once or twice weekly monitoring can do this using the home ultrasound while she is in the comfort of her own home,” Professor Eran Hadar, director of Beilinson’s Maternal and Child Medicine Unit, told JewishPress.com. “This saves travel time, which is even more important if she lives far from the hospital.”
The care begins with an online call – phone or video with a physician – and after taking the history and going through the patient’s concerns and antenatal follow-up, the video session begins via the home ultrasound device, Hadar explained.
“The physician will guide the patient in performing the ultrasound scan by herself with the portable home ultrasound, and will walk her through how to move the transducer until all necessary parameters of the fetus are visible, thus determining its well-being (and in the future also its estimated fetal weight and dopplers). We are also in the process of implementing fetal monitoring remotely.
“The home ultrasounds can also be done offline whereby the patient performs the ultrasound and uploads the scans for remote offline interpretation,” Hadar added.
But virtual care is available for other types of care as well.
A diabetic maternity patient who uses a glucometer/sensor to measure her glucose can have her glycemic follow-up uploaded to the cloud and all changes to her insulin or other diabetic medication would be made via video conference with the physician after sharing all of her glucose measurements through an online cloud-app, Hadar explained.
Simple pregnancy follow-up meetings can also be done via video conference, he said.
“We are working on more advanced tools to integrate in the future that will allow the patient to use the doppler and we will be able to estimate the fetal weight remotely, minimizing face-to-face appointments which is more convenient for patients,” Hadar noted.
“This can also be applied in countries where a patient may live far from their physician such as Australia, India, African countries and in the USA where not everyone lives very close to their hospital.”
The war has caused Israeli hospitals rethink how medical care is delivered to our patients and increasingly, there is a need for remote medical services, Beilinson Hospital CEO Dr. Eitan Wirtheim pointed out.
“Our top priorities remain bringing top of the line medical and patient care and Beilinson NEXT allows us to do so in the most accessible way possible as patients can remain in the comfort of their own home and be treated by our physicians.”
Since October 7, the hospital has seen spikes in virtual visits exceeding 50 percent in areas such as ophthalmology, genetics, urology and dermatology.
Currently, patients can access physicians in the hospital’s oncology, hemato-oncology, hematology, genetics, ophthalmology, dermatology, neurology, gynecology, obstetrics and kidney transplant departments as well as in areas such as clinical nutrition and diet therapy, physiotherapy, speech rehabilitation and social work, providing instruction and practice via individual and group online video sessions.
Beilinson also offers smart sensors for patients suffering from heart failure. The sensors transmit real-time data to physicians who check that the patient’s cardiac functioning is balanced. Other services include home hospitalization for a patient who recently visited an emergency room; upon their return home, they are monitored by a dedicated team who conduct virtual visits and monitor the patient 24/7 while they are recovering at home, all free of charge.
The hospital also offers a suite of patient healthcare education modules, including treating wounds, diabetes, heart failure, Crohn’s disease, and guiding families on geriatric, dementia, and other matters.
