Common Questions
A specialty consult is a virtual visit that connects a patient at the bedside with a specialist — a hospitalist, intensivist, neurologist, cardiologist, or another physician — who isn’t physically on-site. Delivered through AvaSure Episodic®, AvaSure’s virtual visits application, specialty consults bring two-way video and EHR-integrated workflows into the patient room so care teams can access physician-level expertise on demand, without a physical transfer or a separate device added to the room.
Health systems are running lean while facing real physician shortages, and many patients — especially in rural or after-hours settings — don’t have consistent local access to specialists like neurologists, cardiologists, or intensivists. Specialty consults close that gap by bringing physician-led expertise to the patient in real time, rather than requiring a transfer to another facility. This helps hospitals respond to workforce shortages, margin pressure, and access gaps at once. Patients get timely, specialized care where they already are, and health systems protect contribution margin by retaining higher-acuity patients, reducing avoidable transfers and out-of-network leakage, and maintaining continuity of care that supports downstream revenue from inpatient services and follow-up treatment.
Yes. By bringing physician expertise to the patient rather than the patient to the physician, health systems can retain higher-acuity patients locally, reduce avoidable transfers and out-of-network patient leakage, and maintain continuity of care that supports downstream revenue from inpatient services and follow-up treatment. Equum Medical CEO Dr. Corey Scurlock has described the partnership with AvaSure as giving health system leaders a practical way to add specialty and high-acuity coverage, ease transfer pressure, and get patients timely care wherever they are.
For patients, specialty consults mean faster access to the right expertise — neurology, cardiology, psychiatry, critical care, and more — without waiting for a transfer or an in-person specialist to become available, which supports safer, more continuous care during nights, weekends, or surge periods when coverage is hardest to staff. For care teams, specialty consults extend what’s clinically possible at the bedside without adding to staff workload. Because they run on AvaSure’s existing enterprise virtual care platform, physicians and specialists connect through infrastructure teams already use for virtual nursing and continuous observation, rather than a new device or workflow bedside staff have to learn. The model is built to support clinicians, not replace their judgment. Physician-led virtual care through partners like Equum Medical works alongside the bedside team, giving them another set of expert eyes rather than another task to manage.
Specialty consults run on the same in-room hardware AvaSure hospitals already use for virtual nursing and continuous observation — there’s no separate device or dedicated telehealth cart required per specialty. AvaSure’s modular devices support two-way video and audio built for clinical environments, and because the platform has open architecture, a new specialty consult program connects into that existing infrastructure rather than requiring hospitals to purchase, install, and maintain new equipment for every new service line.