Mercy Virtual is a virtual care center (also called a "virtual hospital") in

Chesterfield, Missouri Chesterfield is a city in St. Louis County, Missouri, United States. It is a western suburb of St. Louis. As of the 2020 census, the population was 49,999, . The broader valley of Chesterfield was originally referred to as "Gumbo Flats", deriv ...

, a suburb of

St. Louis St. Louis () is the second-largest city in Missouri, United States. It sits near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while the bi-state metropolitan area, which e ...

, which operates solely through the use of telemedicine—the first facility of its kind in the world. Mercy Virtual provides remote services to patients in Mercy system hospitals and medical offices, and to other partner hospitals, by providing diagnosis, prognosis and treatment suggestions and remotely monitors individual patient health. Mercy Virtual monitors patients with special devices that report data which allows ongoing management of health conditions remotely, both at hospitals or outside a medical institution. Mercy Virtual operated without lack of Medicare or Medicaid funding for telemedicine services, but this was temporarily waived at the onset of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identi ...

. The facility contains 300,000 square feet of workspace on a 41-acre site and cost $54 million to develop. The facility provides office environments, videoconferencing rooms and meeting rooms to provide a work environment for nurses, doctors and other healthcare workers staffed at the facility. Mercy Virtual has partnerships to provide telemedicine services to patients of the UNC Health system, Pennsylvania State medical center and the

Allegheny Health Network Allegheny Health Network (AHN), based in Pittsburgh, is a non-profit, 14-hospital academic medical system with facilities located in Western Pennsylvania and one hospital in Western New York. AHN was formed in 2013 when Highmark Inc., a Pennsylv ...

References

Greater St. Louis Telemedicine Healthcare in St. Louis County, Missouri {{Missouri-hospital-stub