Electronic Health Reporter

Providing telehealth solutions for your patients is one of the best ways for you to increase your patient’s health outcomes. Today, it’s easier for you to provide healthcare services to your patients with the advancement in telehealth technology. However, maintaining telehealth services for your healthcare organization is not as easy as it sounds. It needs a good workflow system that can help you handle the patient’s requests each day. Here are 4 best practices for building a long-term telehealth workflow:

• Get Updated on the Staff Appointment Availability

First, you need to understand that the success of your telehealth services will depend on your staff availability. In your healthcare organization, you need to have some staff ready for telehealth appointments, whether via live video conferencing or instant messaging, and you need them to handle the patient’s requests right away. It’s important for you not to let your patients wait for too long just to get them connected to one of your healthcare professionals.

Thus, it’s important for you to keep on updating your staff availability when handling remote appointments from the patients. This is to simplify your workflow, and it can help you handle all patient requests in due time. So, you need to assign enough healthcare professionals to handle the telehealth requests and make sure that they will always be available for instant appointments from the patients.

• Know Each Patient and Their Clinical History

It will save you a lot of time if you keep the record of each patient and their clinical history when you talk with them via telehealth services. Except for the patients that come to you for the first time, you can gather the data about the patient’s clinical history before you start the live video conferencing or any other telehealth session with your patients. This way, you can understand more about the patient’s health conditions and the problems they are experiencing right now.

You don’t need to perform the initial health assessment from the start if you know each patient’s clinical history before making a telehealth appointment with them. It will save a lot of time in your consultation, and you can come up with the best solution for the patient as soon as possible. For this purpose, you need to make the patient’s data accessible for the healthcare professionals working for your telehealth services. 

• Set Time Availability for Your Telehealth Services

Many healthcare organizations will make their telehealth services available for 24 hours every day. However, you might have a different schedule with your telehealth services. It’s important for you to set time availability for your telehealth services, so you can serve your patients in the best way possible in each telehealth session. By setting the time availability that works best for your staff, you can improve your telehealth workflow.

Make sure that your patients know when they can access the telehealth services from your healthcare organization each day. Also, be sure that your healthcare organization can handle the requests of the patients during the work hours. Get all your staff ready to talk with your patients as soon as they receive their calls.

• Use the Best Telehealth Application for Your Telehealth Services

You need to provide the best telehealth application for your patients, which they can use to access various telehealth services you offer to them. The application needs to be free of bugs, and it needs to be easy to use. You can incorporate all your telehealth services in one application, so that your patients can access the service they want to use right away. 

You don’t want to disrupt your patient’s telehealth session with a buggy application that gives various problems when your patients use it, such as disconnecting communication during live video sessions, not being able to access the links within the app, not being able to display patient’s data, and so on. It’s important for you to provide a seamless experience for your patients to access and use your telehealth services. This can also help improve your workflow, because the fewer problems you need to handle, the better and easier for you to work on your telehealth services. 

Conclusion

These are the best practices you can follow to build a long-term telehealth workflow for your healthcare organization. Remember, it will take some time for you to adapt to any changes in your telehealth workflow. The more you expand your telehealth services, the more changes you will need to apply. You will also need to adapt to the challenges you experience in running your telehealth services and keep on improving your telehealth services from time to time.