By Terrence D. Sims, president of strategic growth and marketing, Raintree Systems.
Among the many lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic was that most patients are more than willing – dare we say eager? – to interact with their healthcare providers digitally. When safety concerns limited their ability to see their physicians, therapists or other care providers in person, patients enthusiastically embraced virtual visits. And from all indications, they liked the convenience so much that they want to continue taking advantage of this option.
Easy access to telehealth services is just one of the many ways patients are eager to connect online with healthcare providers. In fact, an Accenture survey found that 60% of patients reported that based on their experience using new technologies during the pandemic, they want to use technology more to communicate with their care providers and manage their health.
Even before the coronavirus upended life, patients were increasingly expecting to manage their care digitally – from scheduling appointments, to messaging their care team, to refilling medications, to paying bills. After all, that’s how most of us manage most other aspects of our lives these days, whether it’s travel, banking or shopping.
Healthcare still has a ways to go to catch up with the efficient digital experience other sectors offer. Nearly 60% of U.S. consumers expect their healthcare digital customer experience to be similar to retail, but 62% said they were unable to accomplish their healthcare goals online, according to a NTT DATA study.
Healthcare organizations of all sizes need to better meet these digital expectations to attract patients and earn their loyalty. That means it’s increasingly important to develop and implement a comprehensive digital patient engagement strategy, a.k.a., a digital front door. Whether you’re a specialty OT, PT or SLP practice, a specialty clinic or a large health care system, your digital front door serves as an entryway to all online services and experiences available to your patients for interacting with your office and care providers.
By Terrence D. Sims, president of strategic growth and marketing, Raintree Systems.
terrence Sims
As COVID-19 continues to influence patient behaviors and causes providers to reevaluate how they operate their businesses, healthcare practices all around the world started looking for solutions that emphasize clinical efficiencies, elevate patient revenue cycle management, as well as feature enhanced reporting and analytics tools.
More so, along with facing challenges of the patient intake process during a pandemic, providers have also been put to the test with learning how to meet the sudden demand for virtual care by adapting to digital healthcare technologies that utilize high levels of automation, facilitate more patient engagement efforts and focus on financial sustainability.
Security and Compliance
In the world of healthcare, efficiency doesn’t just matter at the surface-level but rather in every individual aspect of treatment whether it be scheduling, reporting or financing. To ensure your EHR can keep up with regular system updates, it should host an educational database that allows providers to quickly train staff as well as give patients easy access to explanatory articles and videos. Having these resources conveniently available will help foster positive patient outcomes and encourage seamless software maintenance.
Additionally, while compliance laws allow for the protection of patients’ health information (PHI) and the overall safety of practice operations, it is also important to understand that cybersecurity is an extremely high priority. Especially now with the shift to a remote workforce, employees at home are much more vulnerable to hackers’ attempts to cease connectivity and override confidential data, making the use of virtual private networks (VPN) and verified firewall software critical to the safeguarding of vital business information.
Telehealth is a $2.6B industry and has grown more than 25% since 2015. The global COVID-19 pandemic has switched telehealth’s use and acceptance into overdrive, and nearly every healthcare discipline is utilizing some form of telehealth platforms as part of their clinical offerings.
As the pandemic brought life to a stand-still, industries and employees were placed into one of two categories: those who provided essential services like grocery store staff, doctors, and emergency medical personnel and those who were deemed non-essential.
Non-essential businesses were ordered to shut down all operations while government officials figured out the next best steps for the safety of its citizens. Initially, physical therapy and other non-clinical medical professions were deemed non-essential. This changed when the Department of Homeland Security, along with state governments and healthcare officials, deemed physical therapy an essential healthcare service that should continue to treat its patients.
This acknowledgment placed the physical therapy sector in an interesting predicament. On one hand, many municipalities had issued stay-at-home orders. Even with the re-categorization of physical therapy as an essential healthcare service, many patients simply feared leaving their homes and chose to postpone much-needed physical therapy appointments until the virus was contained.
This dilemma forced physical therapy practitioners to explore the telehealth platform as a way to continue treating patients and to create a much-needed revenue stream for the health of the practice.
COVID-19 Triggers Regulatory Changes
The telehealth industry was already changing dramatically due to COVID-19. To help telehealth services become more widely available, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma relaxed HIPAA restrictions that had previously limited telemedicine as a patient care option.
The deregulations included the ability of physicians to treat patients across state lines without becoming licensed in that particular state and ushered in the development of IT infrastructures that did not meet compliance or regulatory parameters established by HIPPA laws. Lastly, a rapid introduction and approval of dozens of new billing codes were issued to itemize and enable medical professionals to bill Medicare for telehealth services.
For example, Medstar Health, an integrated health system in the Washington D.C. area, went from 10 telehealth visits per week to 4,000 per day. FAIR Health reported that telehealth claims went from their March 2019 base of 0.17% of all claims to 7.57% by the end of March 2020—a 43-fold increase in the first month of the pandemic alone. In the Northeast, where COVID hit incredibly hard, telehealth visits increased 150-fold.
Telehealth is a $2.6B industry and has grown more than 25% since 2015. The global COVID-19 pandemic has switched telehealth’s use and acceptance into overdrive, and nearly every healthcare discipline is utilizing some form of telehealth platforms as part of their clinical offerings. As the pandemic brought life to a stand-still, industries and employees were placed into one of two categories: those who provided essential services like grocery store staff, doctors, and emergency medical personnel and those who were deemed non-essential.
Non-essential businesses were ordered to shut down all operations while government officials figured out the next best steps for the safety of its citizens. Initially, physical therapy and other non-clinical medical professions were deemed non-essential. This changed when the Department of Homeland Security, along with state governments and healthcare officials, deemed physical therapy an essential healthcare service that should continue to treat its patients.
This acknowledgment placed the physical therapy sector in an interesting predicament. On one hand, many municipalities had issued stay-at-home orders. Even with the re-categorization of physical therapy as an essential healthcare service, many patients simply feared leaving their homes and chose to postpone much-needed physical therapy appointments until the virus was contained. This dilemma forced physical therapy practitioners to explore the telehealth platform as a way to continue treating patients and to create a much-needed revenue stream for the health of the practice.
COVID-19 Triggers Regulatory Changes
The telehealth industry was already changing dramatically due to COVID-19. To help telehealth services become more widely available, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma relaxed HIPAA restrictions that had previously limited telemedicine as a patient care option. The deregulations included the ability of physicians to treat patients across state lines without becoming licensed in that particular state and ushered in the development of IT infrastructures that did not meet compliance or regulatory parameters established by HIPPA laws. Lastly, a rapid introduction and approval of dozens of new billing codes were issued to itemize and enable medical professionals to bill Medicare for telehealth services.
