Every 40 seconds, someone has a stroke. Every minute without treatment costs 1.9 million neurons. For rural and critical access hospitals, the gap between that patient and a neurologist is not blocks away. It may be counties away. TeleSpecialists closes that gap: in under five minutes, around the clock, built around your protocols and into your systems.
Rural hospitals and critical access facilities are not under-resourced because of poor leadership or lack of effort. The specialists their communities need are not there, and traditional staffing economics do not work at their scale. Every stroke coordinator and ED Director navigating a rural neurology gap knows these moments.
A stroke patient at 2am.
No neurologist available. The transfer decision gets made without specialist input.
An EEG ordered Monday.
Results arrive Thursday. Clinical decisions get made in the gap.
A neurology admission overnight.
No rounding coverage. A patient stable enough to stay gets transferred anyway.
A follow-up appointment scheduled.
The patient drives two hours, misses it, and never comes back.
These are not edge cases. For hospitals serving rural communities, they are a typical Tuesday.
TeleStroke
The moment of crisis.
Board-certified stroke neurologists available on camera in under five minutes, every hour of every day. Your telestroke program activates. The treatment decision gets made at your facility, for your patient, without a transfer. TeleSpecialists is one of the most experienced telestroke providers serving rural and critical access hospitals in the United States.
TeleNeuroHospitalist Rounding
The 24 to 48 hours after.
Inpatient neurology rounding that keeps admitted patients in your facility. Specialists document directly in your EMR, coordinate with your nursing team, and reduce the transfers that drain revenue and disrupt care.
TeleEEG
Diagnostic clarity without the wait.
Consistent EEG interpretation across all study types with predictable turnaround. Your team moves forward. Your patients get answers.
Outpatient Neurology
The follow-up that actually happens.
Scheduled neurology visits delivered digitally, close to home. Patients who would otherwise travel hours, or skip the appointment entirely, stay connected to their care and stay in your system.
Most of the time, especially with those patients in rural communities, it is the first time they have seen not just a neurologist, but generally a healthcare professional.
Parham Zamani, MD, TeleSpecialists Neurologist
TeleSpecialists is physician-owned and physician-led. The neurologists behind this platform did not end up serving rural communities because of geography. They chose it because they understand what it means for a patient in a small town to see a specialist for the first time.
Being able to serve rural areas that normally would not get specialty care -- that is one of my favorite things about this job. For some of these hospitals, this is the first time they have really interacted with a neurologist.
Stephen McDonald, MD, TeleSpecialists Neurologist
More than 200 board-certified specialists. Every one of them integrated into your team, documenting in your EMR, working within your protocols, ready in your moment of need.
Hendry Regional Medical Center in Clewiston, Florida is a 25-bed critical access hospital serving a rural agricultural community more than 45 minutes from the nearest major medical center. In 2022, HRMC had no neurology coverage, no telestroke program, and zero documented stroke admissions. Every suspected stroke left the building.
By 2025, HRMC was a Joint Commission-certified Acute Stroke Ready facility. The outcomes below were documented through the AHA Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Registry and presented at the American Heart Association International Stroke Conference in 2026.
0 to 60
63 to 44 min
74.9% to 95.1%
Under 5 min
Without teleneurology, we would transfer every suspected stroke. Now we evaluate, treat, and admit. That is not incremental improvement. That is a different hospital.
Tracy Victory, MSN, RN, ED Director and Stroke Coordinator, Hendry Regional Medical Center
If you could take the results we have here and go across the country to rural settings, you could duplicate them. There is certainly the need.
Dakota Redd, Chief Nursing Officer, Hendry Regional Medical Center
Read the full white paper
Elevating Stroke Care in Rural Hospitals — peer-reviewed outcomes data from HRMC, presented at the American Heart Association International Stroke Conference, 2026.
Your hospital has already built something. Our job is to understand what that is and figure out where the gaps are — not show up with a proposal built for someone else’s facility. TeleSpecialists has been providing teleneurology and telestroke services to rural, regional, and critical access hospitals since 2014. More than 400 partner hospitals. More than 1.5 million patient consultations. More than 30,000 patient encounters each month. Every implementation designed around your infrastructure, your workflows, and your community’s specific needs.
The HRMC model is not exceptional. It is reproducible. It has worked at critical access hospitals, regional medical centers, and every facility type in between — across the South, Central, and Midwest United States.
Many of these patients have never even been to a doctor's office. Being able to treat them -- and then educate their families on what to watch for -- that is what makes this work matter.
Randy Dunston, MD, TeleSpecialists Neurologist
Every patient deserves a specialist. Every community deserves a partner.
Yes. Critical access hospitals are among the facilities that benefit most from a telestroke program. The patient population in rural communities faces the same stroke risk as any urban population, with significantly less access to specialist care. TeleSpecialists has implemented telestroke programs in critical access hospitals with as few as 25 staffed beds. The HRMC model — a 25-bed critical access facility that went from zero stroke admissions to Joint Commission certification in under three years — was built specifically to serve as a replicable framework for similar facilities. Our shared coverage model through TSRoute makes this financially viable for lower-volume facilities where a dedicated full-time arrangement is not cost-effective.
Yes. Many partner hospitals begin with TeleStroke coverage and expand into TeleNeuroHospitalist rounding, TeleEEG, and Outpatient Neurology as program confidence and capacity grow. HRMC followed exactly this path: emergency telestroke coverage in 2021, inpatient rounding expansion in 2024, and an outpatient neurology pathway in development for 2025 and beyond. Each service line can launch independently or together, based on your hospital’s specific gaps and readiness.
Yes. Specialists enter orders directly into your EMR. Implementation is designed around your hospital’s existing infrastructure, workflows, and stroke alert protocols — not a standardized deployment that requires your team to adapt to a new system. Your team does not adapt to us. We adapt to you. The implementation team at HRMC mapped the ED layout, defined cart positioning, and built the entire workflow around existing staff roles before going live.
HRMC moved from zero stroke admissions to Joint Commission-certified Acute Stroke Ready status in under three years. Door-to-needle time improved 30% from 2023 to 2025. Emergency Department visit volume tripled over the same period as community trust in the hospital’s capabilities grew. The timeline depends on your starting point, your team’s readiness, and your certification goals. TeleSpecialists works with your stroke coordinator from day one to set realistic milestones and track progress through the AHA GWTG-Stroke Registry.
TeleSpecialists neurologists are on camera in under five minutes of activation. At Hendry Regional Medical Center, documented neurologist response time reached under five minutes in 2025 — a facility that previously had no neurologist available on site at any hour. Response time is tracked as a core quality metric across all partner hospitals, and monthly reviews identify any workflow adjustments needed to maintain that standard.
Yes. Digital neurology programs are structured to be financially accessible for rural and critical access facilities of all sizes. The shared coverage model through TSRoute is specifically designed for lower-volume hospitals where a dedicated full-time arrangement is not cost-effective. Beyond the coverage cost, retaining stroke and neurology patients rather than transferring them keeps the associated revenue in your facility. A program that reduces unnecessary transfers changes the financial picture significantly. TeleSpecialists works with each partner hospital to develop a coverage structure matched to their volume and service needs.
Implementation includes mapping your ED layout, positioning telemedicine carts, assigning roles within your stroke alert protocol, establishing CT suite access for the remote neurologist, and training nursing staff on activation workflows. TeleSpecialists’ quality team works alongside your stroke coordinator through every step. HRMC’s ED
Director described the process: every detail was talked through, and there was always a way to work through what was not going to work. Ongoing quality reviews and recertification support are part of the partnership.
TeleSpecialists serves rural, regional, and critical access hospitals across the South, Central, and Midwest United States, with coverage available to partner hospitals nationwide. Our business development team has direct regional experience in each territory and works with hospital leaders to evaluate coverage needs and build programs suited to their community.
No standard proposal. No sales queue. A direct conversation with someone who knows this work and will tell you honestly whether there is a fit.
TeleSpecialists is the physician-owned digital healthcare solution provider that hospitals nationwide choose when prioritizing superior quality and effective partnership. Since 2014, we have delivered comprehensive teleneurology and telepsychiatry services to more than 1.5 million patients across emergency, inpatient, and outpatient settings. Our board-certified specialists integrate sophisticated technology with clinical expertise to provide rapid, responsive, and reliable consultations that enhance patient access, improve outcomes, and retain revenue. Physician-founded, physician-owned, and physician-led from day one. For more information, visit www.tstelemed.com.
