2020 was a challenging year for healthcare. The COVID-19 pandemic has put pressure on hospitals and clinics to change the way they work to ensure the safety of their staff and patients, as well as changes among primary care providers and small practices.
The reduction in office visits due to safety issues at the start of the pandemic forced many hospitals to quickly consider telemedicine to continue caring for and monitoring patients who choose to avoid waiting rooms.
Is the leap to telemedicine the answer to saving a practice during these unprecedented times?
In fact, telemedicine is implemented in a number of different ways, including configurations that focus on facilitating audio and video calls between the patient and the healthcare professional, as well as those that go as far as supporting remote monitoring of a patient's vital signs in real time.
These options have proven to be the most desirable during the pandemic, as they allow patients to stay at home and interact with their care team without the risk of traveling and exposing themselves to the virus.
However, implementing telemedicine services is not a simple task, considering the implications and potential risks they can pose for the practice and the patient.
To help ensure that the implementation of telemedicine is a success, hospitals should consider the following five best practices when starting their telemedicine journey.
1. identify feasibility and risk factors
One of the first steps in implementing telemedicine is to identify the feasibility and potential risk factors associated with a service or offer.
This is a crucial step in determining which services can be provided via telemedicine and whether the available reimbursements are financially viable to sustain the service and its costs.
Many still see reimbursement as a major challenge for doctors, as they do not provide adequate funding to support the software-related and other telemedicine costs incurred by practices.
Once this has been determined, the next step is to identify the different workflows and processes needed to implement the telemedicine initiative.
2. Evaluate the resources of each offer
The technology market has several options for health clinics and doctors' practices to choose from, including services and products as easy to use as FaceTime and others with more comprehensive features that can track billing, scheduling and content sharing.
Some features that are currently available are:
- Support for remote monitoring of vital signs;
- Integration with electronic medical devices;
- Audio and video support;
- Self-service for scheduling patients;
- Mobile app support ;
- Clinical documentation support; and
- Personalized patient intake forms and records.
3. Start with a pilot as a test drive
Once a technological solution applied to telemedicine has been selected, one of the best ways to identify how it would fit into medical practice is to test the platform with a group of patients and resolve any problems or concerns the group may face, such as poor connectivity, scheduling and billing conflicts or reimbursement issues.
4. Communicate with your patients
Telemedicine is seen by many patients as a more convenient option and an opportunity for medical practices to add value to the services they provide to patients.
To ensure that it's beneficial for everyone, it's important to communicate with patients regularly and document feedback. This can be done through signage, email campaigns or phone calls.
5. Track KPIs to ensure successful implementation
Once a healthcare practice implements a telemedicine offering, it must monitor key performance indicators ( KPIs ) to ensure its success, including:
- Patient satisfaction scores;
- Reimbursements and revenues from telemedicine;
- Provider productivity; and
- Scheduling statistics.
The ability to persist with this change and the ability to resize virtual care to include all types of visits that have the opportunity to be successful virtually requires the support of a broader IT architecture, it requires the support of a secure technological infrastructure that will enable this.
Connected patients: a new reality
Another area of health IT affected by the pandemic is patient monitoring via video cameras and vital signs patches.
The pandemic has led health systems to think outside the box when monitoring COVID-19 patients to reduce exposure and the use of personal protective equipment, sometimes with existing technology.
Monitoring tools have been useful in managing COVID-19 patients during the pandemic and will likely lead hospitals to think about how to expand the role of video resources, such as training computer vision models to look for patient health indicators.
All this, combined with new ways of collecting vital data, gives rise to a technology-driven health experience.
In the coming years, hospitals will have the challenge of increasingly supporting new digital tools and operating models, and will need to adapt to do both, despite budgetary constraints.
Not only do they need to be adaptable and respond to virtual care and the scaling of infrastructure to support it and the identification of new digital tools, but they are also being told that they will have to adapt their budgets while still supporting this advanced digitalization that they have had to implement.
This is a major challenge that hospitals and health professionals will have to face.
Contact the experts at Conversys now and find out about Aruba Networks' security, network management and connectivity solutions. We're on hand to help you overcome new challenges.
About Conversys
Conversys IT Solutions is a provider of Information and Communication Technology services and solutions operating throughout Brazil.
With a highly qualified technical and commercial team and a network of partners that includes the main global technology manufacturers, Conversys IT Solutions is able to deliver customized IT and Telecom Infrastructure solutions to clients.
We invest in our employees and partners and strive for a long-lasting relationship with our clients, because we believe that this is how we gain the skills and knowledge we need to innovate and generate value for the businesses in which we operate.
