After String of Acquisitions, Access TeleCare Has Become the Go-To Provider of In-Hospital Telemedicine
Under the leadership of cardiologist Dr. Chris Gallagher, Access TeleCare has reached one million annual patient encounters, and they’re launching more than 300 new virtual care programs each year.
Written by Logan Plaster
When people hear the term telemedicine, they often think about someone at home, maybe a parent with a sick child, who wants to have a quick video chat with a primary care doc. This model of care exploded during Covid with companies like AmWell and Teledoc leading the charge.
What you might not realize is that arguably the most important use case for telemedicine takes place within the four walls of the hospital. Why? Because we’re living in the midst of a physician shortage, and many hospitals lack access to critical specialists. The idea of the “specialist desert” is particularly stark in rural settings, but can happen in urban centers as well. Often, patients have to be transferred away from their home hospital, by expensive helicopter or ambulance, the minute their care gets complicated.
This is bad news for the hospital and for the patient. Hospitals get paid for actually taking care of patients, so when those folks get shipped out, it’s lost revenue. Hospitals are already operating on razor-thin margins, so this is a serious problem. For patients, these transfers are bad because they’re being taken away from their families and support systems right when they need them most. Studies have shown that patients fare worse when they’re shipped away from their communities for care.
So how can advances in virtual care bridge the gap in specialty care for the sickest patients inside the hospital? That’s the challenge Access TeleCare has been addressing – quite successfully – for more than 20 years.
Origin Story
Chris Gallagher, MD, never intended to be a telemedicine doc. He trained as a cardiologist and in 2011 began working in a rural hospital 70 miles outside of Dallas, TX. After a year he became the hospital’s Chief Medical Officer.
Dr. Gallagher trained in an urban center where he had access to every medical specialty, so he was shocked by what he saw playing out at his facility.
“The hospital had a 10-bed ICU,” Dr. Gallagher recalls. “It ran a daily average of two patients. The number one type of patient transferred out was critical care. These things never made sense to me. We had this beautiful facility and we were sending patients away.”
Dr. Gallagher knew that transferring patients out like this was bad for patients and bad for the hospital, so he got to work on a solution. He and his colleagues rigged up a primitive system that, in retrospect, was the first virtual ICU in Texas. It was a crude setup – a Surface tablet, webcam, and external microphone – and it took a painful twenty-seven steps for the physician to have a patient encounter.
“You can imagine there were like four people on earth who wanted to participate in that program,” he remembers with a laugh. “But it enabled good care, and before long we’d turned it into a no-click solution. Our mantra in those days was that we had to make it ‘Fisher Price easy.’ Push a button, cow goes moo, everybody’s happy.”
At first, Dr. Gallagher and his team assumed that the virtual visits were going to miss key findings, so they made sure that a physician physically saw the patient within 12 hours of the telemedicine visit. After six months, the group unanimously agreed that they hadn’t missed anything critical, so they discontinued the follow-ups.
“That was a really important lesson that affirmed our belief in these systems,” says Dr. Gallagher.
Dr. Gallagher’s work in virtual critical care grew and he launched a company called Access Physicians. That practice was ultimately acquired by Access TeleCare and Dr. Gallagher took the helm as the company’s CEO.
To understand Access TeleCare we have to go back a few years. The company was founded as Specialist On Call twenty years ago, and then it morphed into SOC Telemed. That company grew through acquisition, buying NeuroCal, JSA Psychiatry, Forefront Telecare, and Dr. Gallagher’s Access Physicians.
Today, under the name Access TeleCare, the company provides a million video visits a year to hospitalized patients across eight specialties in fifty states. They are launching more than 300 new programs every year, with 65% being urban settings and 35% rural.
“There's not another organization with our size and scale across these specialties,” says Dr. Gallagher.
Under the Hood
Access TeleCare provides both clinical and technology services in what Dr. Gallagher considers a “turnkey operation.” When they approach a hospital they can be their complete solution (clinical plus technology) or they can handle one part of the equation. They can also hybridize the plan, using some of Access TeleCare’s doctors and some of the hospital’s.
Every day, hospitals are managing patient surges and provider shortages across the spectrum of medicine. By having a range of specialists at the ready, Access TeleCare can have a stabilizing effect for the facility.
“Prior to partnering with us, these hospitals were frantically plugging holes,” says Dr. Gallagher. “Now, we have multiple client relationships that are over a decade old where we've had zero empty shifts for a decade. The hospital doesn't have to think and worry about that anymore, which allows them to focus on other important things.”
The telemedicine cart itself continues to evolve. Devices become more durable, more affordable, and more accurate. But one of the biggest technical challenges isn’t remote diagnostics, but simply workflow management.
“In some facilities we're having 70 to 90 encounters a day. Handling that volume efficiently is the new technical challenge.”
What’s Next
Some of the folks in the StartUp Health community are dreaming about a future that has yet to be built. Access TeleCare, on the other hand, is deep in the market, firing on all cylinders. Yet even for such an established player, there’s room for exciting innovations. For instance, as the technology in the telemedicine cart improves, the possibilities for remote care expand.
“Now you've got a camera in the room, what do you want to do with it?” says Dr. Gallagher. “Does this become another vehicle for nursing or tele-sitting?”
Access TeleCare is also expanding its use of AI to improve how it triages problems on the front end, so that as the volume of patient encounters grows dramatically, they’ll be able to get the right patient to the right specialist at the right time.
While consumer-facing telemedicine could be categorized as a nice-to-have innovation, what Dr. Gallagher and his team are doing in the hospital is literally critical. They’re caring for the sickest of the sick in their moments of need, and they’re helping cash-strapped rural hospitals keep their doors open by improving revenue. That’s a health moonshot mission we’re excited to support.
Join us in welcoming Chris Gallagher, MD, and the team at Access TeleCare to the StartUp Health community.
Connect with Access TeleCare via email
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Published: Mar 13, 2025
