In the modern world, the telehealth strategy has been essential for each hospital to respond to the varying demands of patients as well as prospects around care. The telehealth implementation industry is supporting the revolutionary transformation of the healthcare background as well as improving the patient experience from virtual visits and online patient portals to remote monitoring, wearable gadgets, cloud-based medical data as well as special health applications.
What is Telehealth?
Telehealth is a technology that is occasionally utilized for clinical as well as non-clinical services, containing administrative meetings, provider training, and regular medical education. It is specially developed to support and improvement for the complete healthcare industry.
Sometimes telemedicine app development company can be utilized occasionally in the place of telehealth but its definition and applications are different from each other. Telemedicine is developed to make possible remote conferences and clinical services as well as to organize chronic conditions and it is also suitable for follow-up visits. It is usually patient-centric.
The telemedicine/telehealth industry is growing rapidly in the US with a projected capital market value of over $130 billion by the year 2025. This figure was around $26.5 billion in the year 2018. Robust telehealth is essential for all healthcare providers.
Advantages of Telehealth
- It is beneficial for the healthcare industry. The doctors can offer care remotely to patients which is very essential for some of them who are unable to access or facing issues accessing a medical service for various reasons. It is also fruitful for old age patients, disabled patients, or people who have no opportunity for a personal visit.
- It can save the precious time of patients and clinicians. Telehealth solutions can significantly reduce wait as well as travel times.
- It is capable to reduce geographical obstacles. Telehealth solutions permit people to provide and receive quality healthcare and it does no matter where they are. Additionally, telehealth permits patients to stay with their doctor when they shift and access care when they belong to rural areas with poor medical facilities.
- It boosts safety. People who are suffering from pre-existing or immunocompetent conditions have an additional risk of infection when visiting a doctor’s clinic personally. Telehealth services may be a great alternative for them because from the support of telehealth services they can get medical assistance while living safely at house. Additionally, contactless conversation with patients also enables doctors to stay better too.
- It can enhance the workflow. The facility of Video chats takes very less time for the conversation with the patient and permits providers to offer medical care quicker as well as more professionally.
- Telehealth solutions can be utilized anytime from anywhere in the world, they permit practices to give unlimited working hours as well as weekend support without the need for staff in a medical facility. It also offers flexible scheduling to its users.
- It can overcome healthcare expenses. Healthcare delivery needs numerous resources and therefore in the hospital that’s why it is costly. Telehealth is the best option to overcome the expenses when their in-person visit is not crucial for some issues such as deep sore throat, flu, pink eye, cough, rashes, etc.
- The handiness and simplicity of telehealth solutions became noticeable during the lockdown time during the pandemic Covid-19. Although, some obstacles still exist to telehealth implementation. They can be categorized into five categories: regulatory, technological, behavioural, financial, as well as security.
Why Your Hospital Needs a Telehealth Strategy
Nowadays the number of patients is increasing patient at the clinic of physicians and specialists day by day so telehealth facility is supporting people to receive the proper care according to their need. For healthcare providers, it is a vital strategy to supervise the health of their patients from a high volume, not expensive perspective.
Telehealth provides lots of advantages to hospitals and some of them are given below:
Supporting to boost patient care in rural areas: In rural communities, patients stay too far away from doctors and specialists therefore sometimes they could not receive proper care in an emergency. Similarly, social workers, as well as care managers, may not be available for the regular diseases in small villages, and now this scenario is transforming with the support of Telehealth such as:
- With telehealth supports the patient is now receiving treatment locally without any risk or in a less expensive environment.
- It supports Local hospitals to improve as well as expand their services while getting better revenue.
- Patient care level has been improved, evidence-based, and surrounds best practices.
- It is offering remote patient monitoring at their home and achieves the best results at a minimal cost.
Additionally, the CMS has extended its compensation, especially for remote care services, reducing a few previous issues to telemedicine. In January 2019, it has putted three latest CPT codes for the settlement of remote patient monitoring.
Enhancing the Management of Chronic Disease: Telehealth strategies may be mainly helpful for patients who are suffering from chronic disease. According to a survey by the CDC, it is found that 6 out of 10 American adults have a chronic disease and around 4 of them are suffering from two chronic diseases.
In the current scenario, the US spends around 75% of the total budget on chronic disease accounts. Hospitalization has been common for people who have chronic diseases. The healthcare service providers are utilizing care management strategies to which are supporting them to maintain the health of their patients as well as keep them out of the hospital. These strategies need partial patient contact as well as regular monitoring and telehealth are the best platforms to achieve this. Telehealth has been launched in the year 2016 and till now it has reduced visits to ER by half as well as hospitalization by around 90% and the cost of care reduced by the 50%.
Develop Better Relationships between Doctors and their patients
Health systems concentrating on their telehealth abilities will be perfectly placed to react to patient demands and enhance the relationship between doctors and patients with digital transformation.
It can reduce the percentage of readmissions and hospitalizations.
It supports improving the Overall health of patients.
It is capable to provide higher patient satisfaction.
What goes into a Telehealth Implementation Checklist?
The team needs to formulate a robust plan that demonstrates how to approach the execution. There are telemedicine execution checklists are given below:
1. Form a transparent planning
The organizations need to have clear reasons as well as compelling requirements for executing the telemedicine program. Goals should illuminate through the research and data. It’s a major element to recognize the key metrics that will support to program toward success.
2. Develop a great Team with Cross-functions
You will have to include the staff people as well as service providers from different areas. You can consider IT, construction, legal, and medical professionals. You should have a clear procedure to cut across these practical concerns are vital. If a delay occurs, or if a judgment must be made so at that time there will requirement to be a clear line of command.
3. Verify Legislation
If you forgot about this important point then it may be a very expensive mistake and you can’t leave it for the end. Legal due carefulness, specifically for sensitive areas like telemedicine is crucially essential. You can utilize the rule HIPAA which is already available and your team should be aware of the city-specific health network, tools as well as connectivity rules.
4. You should check Your Vendor Partners
Technology is capable to make or break the programs like telehealth. Some vital factors like simplicity to use, cyber security, and integration are significant to the accomplishment of your program.
It’s not the difficult equipment vendors required to be organized. Even basic equipment vendors like lighting and furniture must be reliable.
5. Execute a Change Management Checklist
Embracing integration simply means that it is essential to change management programs for you. Sometimes medical professionals also stressed to learn about new things.
A change management plan may be a fruitful idea and if there is any obstacle in execution or adoption so at that time the change management plan can support you.
6. Learn from Feedback
It is a must to observe the program to learn how your program is going on. You can add feedback loops so it will support you to identify the usability of the system.
Even sometimes the system which is bitterly designed can need tweaks after the project is complete.
7. Calculate the Performance Against Goals
You will have to set your working plan for this you can set the periodic measurements which will support you in goal tracking. You have to correct the falling shortly before it is gone too late.
How Much Does It Cost to Implement Telehealth?
This is a basic question which asks by so many people. Telehealth expenses are variable. It completely depends on where you practice as well as on the competition between the telehealth vendors who can support you.
There are some following items are given below and you don’t need to worry about them because they will go into your budget:
- Contractor costs
- Hardware and networking costs
- Software and licensing fees
- Consultancy as well as modification expenses from the EHR vendor
- Training Charges
Apart from these backups, Data conversion, as well as storage, are also less expensive.
It is usual for some practices to get telehealth for under the budget of $80,000. Of course, if you select to go towards a state-of-the-art system, then it could cost you around $150,000.
Overcoming Barriers to Telehealth Implementation
The implementation of the telehealth program may be a difficult task because for it you will have to give extra training to workers to utilize the technologies correctly and expertly before execution. You will also have to negotiate for the latest technologies. The insights as well as benchmark data may be limited for the latest and rising technologies which can hold back effective benchmarking.
Conclusion
Telemedicine software development companies can offer the best support to value-based care, offering better access, simple coordination of care, smoother transitions in care, and budget-friendly as well as it provides extra opportunities to enhance the provider payment. However, the coronavirus crisis is a unique situation; it is not only the reason telehealth has achieved huge popularity. It is trendy just because is fruitful for the patients, and best for providers, as well as it can be beneficial in the terms of profitability if implemented accurately with careful planning. Groovy Web builds the best solution with HIPAA Compliant Telehealth Platform, to perfectly support their clients.
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