Cleveland Clinic Increases Market Access

Approximately 80% of Cleveland Clinic’s patients come from a six-county area, 19% come from the rest of the U.S. and about 1% from overseas.

Cleveland Clinic’s strategies have included hospital transfers. It has about 20,000 hospital transfers on an annual basis. Patients visit for tertiary, quaternary care, and approximately 25% of its beds are intensive-care beds.

Cleveland Clinic has also experienced substantial growth in its outpatient visits. Cleveland Clinic continues to build outpatient facilities as well as test other innovative strategies to reach people who are increasingly going to outpatient from inpatient.

Cleveland Clinic and HealthSpot are looking to form a joint venture that will offer patients convenient, alternative options to access health care through HealthSpot’s virtual walk-in kiosks.

HealthSpot stations — private, 8-by-5-foot enclosures outfitted with touch screens, integrated medical devices and videoconferencing capabilities — will enable Cleveland Clinic medical providers to see and treat patients in a variety of nontraditional healthcare settings, like universities, employers and retail locations. An on-site accredited medical assistant also supports each station.

Patients can walk up to a station without scheduling an appointment and be treated for minor, common health conditions, including cold and flu, rashes and skin conditions, eye conditions, earaches, sore throat, sinus infections, upper respiratory infections and seasonal allergies. HealthSpot station visits will fully integrate into a patient’s Cleveland Clinic electronic medical record, ensuring seamless communication and continuity of care.

Cleveland Clinic has been offering patients second opinions remotely over the Internet with its MyConsult program since 2002. More recently, the hospital has been piloting a number of technologies in remote monitoring, home health, virtual visits, and other areas of telemedicine.