Houston-area Wal-Marts get Telemedicine clinics

HOUSTON My Healthy Access, a provider of retail health care services to the urban marketplace, has inked a joint operating agreement with healthcare service provider NuPhysicia to operate Telemedicine clinics in select Houston-area Wal-Mart Supercenters.

Under the agreement, physicians will serve patients at the Walk-In Telemedicine Health Care centers using remote telemedicine through paramedics who will examine patients under direct supervision of a physician.

“Simply put, the paramedic serves as the ‘hands’ of the physician, who uses medical devices such as an electronic stethoscope to listen to the heart or other scopes that can see down the throat or in the ears, and the physician sees and hears everything live and in real time,” explained Glenn Hammack, president of NuPhysicia. “The physician performs the exam as if he or she was in the room with the patient.”

According to the Healthy Access Web site, there are six clinics in operation within Wal-Mart Supercenters.

The program is one of the service lines of NuPhysicia, a private medical services company products from telemedicine program at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

“Our telemedicine methods have served hundreds of thousands of patients from Texas to as far away as the South Pole,” stated Hammack. “Similar live-video technology is now monitoring the most critically ill in ICUs across the nation, now we can offer the residents of Houston access to convenient, high-quality health care.”