Mercy, one of the country’s largest Catholic health systems, is planning on the financial benefits of telemedicine by creating a standalone virtual medical center, according to an article on the Healthcare Finance website.

In May, Mercy broke ground on a 120,000-square-foot facility designed to consolidate all its telemedicine initiatives under one roof. The $50 million building in Chesterfield, Mo., will be home to 300 physicians, nurses, researchers and support staff when it opens in 2015.

The Mercy project's aim is to improve the quality of care for patients throughout their system, help reduce the cost of care by sharing specialists and also be able to create revenue by being able to provide this service to other institutions outside the Mercy system, the article said.

In addition to helping save costs and potentially bringing in revenue, a virtual center for telemedicine can help improve the quality of care, due to the amount of data and use of analytics to understand that data, Wendy Deibert, vice president of Mercy's Telehealth Services, said in the article. 

“We will continue to evolve algorithms as the larger volumes of patients allow us to more quickly prove which interventions result in better outcomes.”

Read the article.