How To Plan & Operate A Telehealth Program Successfully?
For the healthcare industry to be successful, it should get into the depths of the human mind and health. Such that a successful telehealth program should be able to do this considering empathy, knowledge, and the tools at hand to reach patients even if they are at the end of the world (if such a thing exists!).
The growth of automation and technology made it easier for healthcare workers to reach people who were considered unreachable. Technology became the agent here to enable interventions like video meetings in the personal, convenient places of the patients.
Among the vast variety of programs available in the healthcare spectrum, telehealth plays a unique role in improving the quality of remote care and extending its accessibility to unlimited levels.
First Let Us See, What Is Telehealth?
Telehealth is the distribution of health-related services and information via electronic information and telecommunication technologies. It allows long-distance patient and clinician contact, care, advice, reminders, education, intervention, monitoring, and remote admissions.
Telemedicine is sometimes used as a synonym or is used in a more limited sense to describe remote clinical services, such as diagnosis and monitoring.
Telehealth may bridge the gap as well as provide distance learning; meetings, supervision, and presentations between practitioners; online information and health data management, and healthcare system integration.
Telehealth could include two clinicians discussing a case over video conference; a robotic surgery occurring through remote access; physical therapy is done via digital monitoring instruments, live feed, and application combinations; tests being forwarded between facilities for interpretation by a higher specialist; home monitoring through continuous sending of patient health data; client to practitioner online conference; or even videophone interpretation during a consult.
The Benefits Of Telehealth
There are many benefits to using a telehealth program for both the patients and the providers. Among them, the most valued are:
- It increases the continuity of the care delivered
- It enables access to the care whenever the patients need
- It helps in reducing travel expenses and time
- Remote Patient Monitoring techniques used here will reduce the fear of clinical shortages
- Helps the people in rural and unreachable areas to get access to quality healthcare services
- In a telehealth program, all types of patients will be served equal and better
- Especially COVID-19 situation has opened much more benefits of telehealth to the world due to the restrictions
- Telehealth plays a significant role in the reduction of the spread of deadly diseases and viruses
RELATED: Top Telehealth Trends To Watch In 2022
So, How Do You Set Up A Successful Telehealth Program?
- First, you need not take new steps to do this, you just have to upgrade and improvise.
- By simply following a step-wise approach, healthcare systems like yours can easily design a telehealth program, meeting your team’s needs.
- The most important step while setting up is that you should do some digging and find an experienced software provider to partner with, that can help you and your team reach its needs and goals.
Here Are The Steps To Getting Started
Proper planning is crucial to handling software like electronic health records (EHR). Do not rush even if you are in urgent need. Follow the steps and make sure you choose an integrated cloud-based EHR software for making the workflow smooth.
Step 1: Determine your goals
Setting up your basic goals is important. You should consider the following points while setting up your goals.
- What should you benefit from the program?
- Your long term and short term goals with the software
- What should a telehealth program do for your team?
Let us give you some examples of goals
- Expanding your service market by increasing referral sources
- Maximizing your productivity by reducing the “no-show” rates, improving compliance and outcomes, and balancing the provider workload by delegating across locations.
- Increasing business timing
- Reduction of wasted time
- Attracting and retaining contact with remote care providers
- Increasing provider and patient satisfaction
- Maintaining provider-patient relationship
- Reducing staff burden in both administration and technical
Step 2: Success planning
For easy starting and smooth continuation of a telehealth program, healthcare systems can follow a preplanned roadmap like the following
- Assess the needs of your organization, define the program’s model, and document the business case.
- Design and develop a tech plan, and how will you monitor the performance.
- Finally, implement the telehealth program, and monitor and execute the quality improvement.
These are the basic plan. One can work within and expand the ideas according to their needs and timing.
We Know How To Plan For A Telehealth Program. Let Us Now See What Are The Things To Look For In A Telehealth Program
Your team might already perform productively, but a telehealth platform only adds to it and make them more capable of doing what they now do more efficiently. It can add extra features that can even streamline work and enhance the patient experience.
- Telehealth allows you to reach more patients effortlessly.
- Look for a platform that enables you to fill openings, cancellations, and walk-in slots in your schedule with virtual digital appointment schedulings.
- Look out for one that provides a constant line of communication between you and your patients.
- Make sure it has facilities like phone call reminders, message facilities, and automated notifications and reminders.
- Facilities to save phone numbers and e-mail IDs of the patients.
- Facility to allow the patients to use their PC or laptop to complete forms, make payments, or attend a video visit.
- Look for an integrated telehealth platform to achieve greater interoperability.
- Look for telehealth software that allows you to connect quickly and effectively.
An Overview
The best telehealth program is that which provides easy access to patients in both urban and most remote places. Many ways are being tested and found to make this reach even more practical and successful.
Telehealth makes everything easy to reach. So, it is safe for all the providers in the healthcare system to adapt to the services of telehealth and to stay in the technological competition.
Looking for the best telehealth platform? Welcome to Vozo’s telehealth platform, which can transform your practice’s efficiency from what’s now to what you think is impossible to achieve. We provide the best healthcare products and software for you to shine anywhere.
Our telehealth solutions are the smart choice for delivering care remotely. You can schedule and conduct virtual visits directly from your EHR without any additional software.
Our HIPAA-compliant, easy-to-use video visits are specially designed for primary care physicians and specialists that let you provide immediate patients care and easy patient engagement through chat and secure messages.
Visit us now for more details. We do provide many other healthcare software and services. Contact us now.
“Let’s make your practice reach out to people by breaking barriers, together”
About the author
With more than 4 years of experience in the dynamic healthcare technology landscape, Sid specializes in crafting compelling content on topics including EHR/EMR, patient portals, healthcare automation, remote patient monitoring, and health information exchange.
His expertise lies in translating cutting-edge innovations and intricate topics into engaging narratives that resonate with diverse audiences.