Tag Archives: Telehealth

Understand the importance, value and use of Telehealth during this pandemic

Understanding Preventive Care Services

Telehealth has become increasingly important and has seen a striking evolution during this COVID 19 pandemic and is especially capable of having a huge effect on how patients communicate with providers and receive care.

Telehealth refers to a broader scope of remote healthcare services. According to the World Health Organization, Telehealth encompasses, “Surveillance, health promotion, and public health functions.”

The National Consortium of Telehealth Resource Centers has published a video on “Telehealth Policy in a Post-COVID-19 World.” In this video, Center For Connected Health Policy (CCHP) tells what temporary policy changes might remain Post-COVID-19 and what could be issues that policymakers may think merit future action. This will help policymakers, practitioners, payers, and the public understand how to accurately discuss “Telehealth” and its key components.

Understanding the dynamics of Telehealth

Telehealth is presently delivered in 2 major ways:

Video Conferencing (VC) - This is used for real-time provider-patient consultations, PCP-Specialist/ Provider – Provider.

No special software downloads for patients to connect, just click the HIPAA secure link to join the video call, share videos, file, photos, messages, etc.
Patients and providers can connect from anywhere, improved access for remote patients
Easy text or email reminders, easy reschedules, patient self-scheduling.

Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) - This is used to provide appropriate support for patient self-management and helps in gathering patient data outside of traditional healthcare settings or helps transmit patient health information to health care providers.

RPM Benefits for patients:

No travel expenses and spending time on travel as the in-person visit is not required
Less interference with personal responsibilities like childcare, elder care, etc
No exposure to other potentially contagious patients

RPM Benefits for Providers:

Increased efficiency and revenue
Better patient care and improved health outcomes
Fewer circumstances that lead to no-shows

Importance, benefits, and use of Telehealth

Telehealth provides valuable features that help providers achieve health care’s triple aim – access to care, improved patient outcomes, and reduce cost to the provider. Telehealth removes obstructions of time, distance, and specialty lack. This includes remote, rural, and medically underserved urban communities.

It helps reduce readmissions, stops unnecessary hospitalizations, and ER visits.
It provides peace of mind to patients' family members as they know the patient is receiving the proactive care they need.
It incessantly captures and analyses real-time data and integrates alert algorithms, and helps identify patients who are at risk of emergency department visits (ER Visits) or hospitalization.
It is more reliable, enhances the quality of care, care coordination, saves costs, and time for both the provider and the patient.

Related Article: Role of Telehealth In Chronic Care

How to implement Telehealth:

Implement Telehealth into your existing operation and it has to be designed to complement your standard practices and workflows.

Plan a workflow analysis to reveal how this has to fit in with standard clinical practice.
Consider this technology as another tool for the delivery of normal services with the only difference of the patient being at a remote location.
Keep it simple.

Implementing sustainable Telehealth is the need of the hour. Talk to HealthViewX solution experts to understand how to instantly launch a Telehealth Program into your practice. Schedule a demo today, get up and run quickly, get started in a jiffy irrespective of the size of the operation.

Capitalize on the Benefits of Telehealth to Ensure Care and Business Continuity Amid COVID- 19

The adoption of telemedicine shifted into hyper-drive over the past month, with virtual health-care interactions on pace to top 1 billion by year’s end, according to analysts at Forrester Research.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, many barriers obstructed the lack of adoption of Telehealth. Cost/ budget, different opinions in consensus decision-making, implementation challenges, migration from the current process, upkeep of old technology, delay in decisions, many physicians seeing technology as impersonal, etc. were all some of the barriers to adoption. But now all of those barriers have dramatically collapsed.

Shift in care delivery mode amid the COVID 19 Pandemic

Hospitals and health systems everywhere are staring at a sharp slump in revenue. To stay afloat healthcare systems are exploring and evaluating a variety of virtual care models, and ramping up Telehealth adoptions. Their technology teams are working around the clock to deliver infrastructure support to facilitate Telehealth. Health systems are urging their physicians and patients to obviate the need for in-person visits, and instead use Telehealth visits to help prevent the spread of coronavirus.

March Telehealth visits surged 50% amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to research from Frost and Sullivan consultants.

Virtual Care is the need of the hour:

Virtual care/appointments have quickly become one of the most important tools to ensure care continuity for patients while keeping safe during this pandemic. One of the Telemedicine providers has reported a spike in video requests to more than 15,000 per day. Forrester expert analysts estimate that virtual visits could top 900 million this year based on the current projections for coronavirus infections in the US.

Enabling Change – Telehealth into the spotlight

The care that used to take place only in brick-and-mortar settings can now occur digitally. Telehealth is stepping up into the spotlight and helping providers to ensure care continuity. Hospitals are enabling changes to assure care delivery, provide uninterrupted care, meet the needs of their staffs, and complement their existing workflows in the current scenario. It is evident that hospital CIOs should invest in Telehealth technology to help care continuity while also ensuring business continuity.

Telehealth is part of a larger digital transformation in health care. Telehealth technology benefits hospitals and health systems in many ways and some of them are enumerated below:

Improves patient engagement, builds capacity to expand access, improves outcomes & reduce costs
Increases specialist access availability and capacity, provides 24/7 access to care, improves access & fill gaps in care
Enables virtual care and virtual appointment
Enhances clinical relationships with partners and within specialty networks.
Implementation/expansion of value-based care models.

Apart from the ones listed above, Telehealth helps in point of access for urgent care, specialty consults, post-discharge management, health counseling, chronic care management, referral management, and many more.

Telehealth usage has expanded recently in many use cases. Some of them are listed below:

eConsult - Templated communications where PCP’s consult with specialists to send and receive information on patient care and discuss patient care.

Virtual Care - Distant specialists connect in real-time to a PCP or a clinical setting to deliver care.

Remote-patient Monitoring - Providers remotely monitor patients via connected/mHealth devices.

Virtual Appointments/ Video Visits - Provider connects directly with the patient via video to conduct the equivalent of a visit.

eVisit - Provider connects with patients via email or secure messaging to provide clinical advice or support.

Patient Acceptance of Telehealth Services - Among patients surveyed after their initial encounter, 97% were satisfied with the experience and would recommend the program, and 74% felt that the interaction actually improved their relationship with their provider.

Why Telehealth?

Health care providers saved almost $2,750 per patient when using Telehealth instead of in-person physical therapy when discharged after knee-replacement surgery.

Health systems that don’t address the expectations of their patients will be challenged by competitors and new market entrants. Telehealth helps to treat patients in a more effective way, and is an efficient way to use limited staff and resources. Telehealth will help reduce costly readmissions, improve clinical outcomes, and make healthcare services even more impactful.

Development or strengthening of health systems or hospitals can be leveraged across multiple sites by connecting physicians, specialists, imaging or diagnostic centers, hospitals, etc. Virtual care will not only improve the care quality and health outcomes but also will improve timing by eliminating travel and as well bringing in specialized care as and when needed.

Are you looking for Telehealth Services for your patients?

Schedule a demo and talk to our solution experts. Our experts will help you implement the solution and get your practice started with Telehealth Services in a jiffy!

Learn how the COVID-19 pandemic is transforming healthcare with technology

The COVID-19 pandemic and its global sweep is scaling exponentially across the globe. We are witnessing that health systems across some of the COVID-19 affected countries are stretching beyond their ability to handle this pandemic. The affected countries have geared up and are urgently scaling-up aggressive measures to tackle the disease and combat COVID-19.

Unfortunately, even some large health systems in developed countries are designed to handle regular patient loads and not pandemics. The international community has asked for US$675 million to help protect states with weaker health systems as part of its Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan. Right from mid-March till the first week of April, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled. Patients with an extreme disease from COVID-19 need average respiratory support of approximately 13 days and the number of new patients that can be accommodated during this prolonged outbreak is really low.

The rapid growth of cases can alter a public health emergency into an operational crisis if containment flops. Proper planning and response will require multidisciplinary effort from physicians, healthcare professionals, nurses, respiratory specialists, supply chain, pharmacists, etc.

Here’s how technology is helping through its virtual care potential and other advancements

Healthcare workers on the front lines are overwhelmed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The number of calls they receive from patients who want to talk to their respective physicians about COVID 19 symptoms is unimaginably high. As a result, health systems are suggesting their patients to use self-triaging tools to check for the COVID-19 symptoms before putting them through to their doctors. Chatbot’s have also been reconfigured with FAQ’s and assessment related to Coronavirus symptoms.

The current COVID 19 outbreak scenario is terrifying and the major concern for many of us throughout the world. Due to the sudden spike, patients triaged for COVID-19 should wait long in a virtual queue. During this long wait patients get frustrated and impatient, and also puts many patients in a state of panic and anxiety. In one of the articles it is stated that the number of virtual visits have gone 10-15 times more after the COVID-19 outbreak.

This insists on the need for health systems to standardize and streamline processes eventually to handle intake volumes and have the technology in place to manage such pandemics efficiently. It is said since the COVID-19 outbreak Telehealth visits/usage has increased by approximately 500% in the last few weeks. While some of the health systems have already successfully adapted to new healthcare technologies there are still plenty out there who have not thought about it yet.

It is time for health systems to realize, the power and potential of Telehealth, bring it into the mainstream and take it at one stroke to transform care delivery. Likewise, remote patient monitoring is also equally important to monitor chronic conditions patients and patients who are at high risk or suspected of contracting the virus during such pandemics.

The COVID-19 pandemic may be a turning point as we look at the future of healthcare across time horizons, how we live and work, and perhaps the planet’s future. During such situations, a certain degree of reprioritization is needed to speed-up the digital transformation of healthcare delivery.

Mainstreaming of Telehealth

Telehealth is on the rise during the COVID-19 pandemic. The HealthViewX platform supports patient-to-provider, provider-to-provider and multi-party collaboration from the onset of a condition. The platform supports both audio and video calling, and live-chats along with document transfer. Allows patients to join from any device like mobile, laptop, tabs, etc. It enables healthcare organizations to customize Telehealth experience for providers and patients, thereby enhancing the quality of patient care, raising patient engagement and improving patient experience and health outcomes.

For further customization, the platform engine helps build digital tools and platforms on-the-fly with no-code or low-code to orchestrate care journeys and facilitates transitioning to value-based care. The current system definitely needs to adapt to modern healthcare technology.

Talk to us to understand more about healthcare technology advancements.