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.
I’ve heard from several home healthcare agency administrators that they are preparing to don their scrubs for the first time in years to enter the front lines. This is because the long-term care industry continues to face one of its greatest threats in history, a classic business crisis of supply and demand.
In a recent survey, 88% of respondents stated their home care business was negatively affected by the caregiver shortage, and another survey reported in Bloomberg Businessweek saw 85 percent of organizations in Wisconsin did not possess the necessary staff to cover the shifts scheduled.
This problem extends nationwide. Clinicians across the United States have been tasked with providing care to an increasing patient population, which will continue to grow with what is commonly cited as the “Silver Tsunami” of 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 every day.
As a result, the aging population is anticipated to reach 88 million in 2050. And yet, we must consider that many retiring nurses are baby boomers fated to become patients themselves. Without enough staff to meet the needs of the growing patient population, organizations are plagued by missed visits and the consequences. Fortunately, some good has come amid the pandemic, most notably that technology has been given a boost.
Technology has also become much more prominent in healthcare with secure mobile communication that enables caregivers to spend more time on patients, along with wearable devices to track activity data and artificial intelligence to predict outcomes. Telehealth and remote care monitoring have grown exponentially due to COVID-19 and can quickly address the staffing crisis by augmenting existing practices and boosting efficiency and productivity.
Benefits of Telehealth
Through its ability to maintain patient-provider relationships over a distance, even the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) acknowledged telehealth as an essential component in care continuity. Telehealth also eases the impact of nursing shortages in rural communities and beyond by improving efficiency, as caregivers utilizing telehealth can help remotely care for more patients in less time.
Telehealth is far more than a technology that allows patients to be monitored virtually within a hospital by a specialist or at home by a provider. Although these are key areas for hospitals to utilize telehealth for patients to access specialists and for home care – there is so much more.
My definition of telehealth is that it is a healthcare strategy to be utilized to dramatically improve the care of patients and communities and to support families who care for patients.
4 Ways Telehealth Can Improve Hospital Operations
Telehealth can aid in reducing hospital readmissions as patient behaviors account for most of the readmissions from medication nonadherence, not scheduling follow-up appointments and, not having access to equipment or supplies.
Proactively utilizing telehealth for high-risk patients and for the elderly, to maintain care at home and ensure health outcomes.
Innovative areas where telehealth can be used include rehabilitation care, mental health resources, and even second opinions.
Telehealth can be used within hospital marketing campaigns to increase awareness and utilization of the service.
As a seasoned industry expert in the healthcare industry, and the CEO and founder of VIE Healthcare Consulting, I am considered a trusted advisor to hospital leaders on operational strategies within margin improvement, process improvements, technology/telehealth, the patient experience, and growth opportunities.
Since founding VIE in 1999, my team and I have achieved over $785 million in non-salary cost savings and revenue improvements for clients globally. My goal is to continuously encourage hospital leaders to achieve their boldest vision and in order to help them do so, I have created the healthcare sector’s only cost savings strategy methodology that is proven to extract unnecessary costs.
For healthcare providers, developing a specific telehealth strategy is key to your overall strategic plan. To begin, I will provide you with five self-assessment strategies to help you further define, develop and deploy a comprehensive telehealth strategy in your organization.
With the introduction of newer applications, data strategies, assistive listening devices and more, technology is helping to improve the quality of life of seniors, especially those in care facilities. The pandemic accelerated the implementation of advanced technologies and now more seniors own a smartphone or take part in video conferencing and telehealth, for example. This has allowed them to reach out to family and friends remotely and access more information related to their health. Here are a few examples of how technology is improving the quality of life of seniors.
Automated messaging
With automated messaging services such as SMS for Healthcare, the families of seniors in residents and assisted living facilities can receive regular updates about their well-being and daily activities. This is now a common service and provides families with peace of mind. The pandemic helped to raise awareness of the importance of these types of messaging services as people weren’t able to visit their loved ones.
Telemedicine is rapidly defining the modern medical landscape, with thousands of patients moving away from in-person meetings to video consultation. Statistics reported by the CDC identify that up to 30% of all medical visits are now conducted remotely, via digital means, underlining the importance of digital healthcare in the modern medical ecosystem.
One area in which this has created questions is the provision of Medicare. How does the preference for digital medical care change billing? And how has technology impacted medical insurance and its applicability to medicare-eligible groups? Telehealth is, at the very least, improving access to healthcare to those groups eligible for Medicare.
By Vikram Savkar, vice president and general manager of the medical segment at Wolters Kluwer’s Health Learning, Research and Practice business
During the pandemic, nearly every healthcare provider in the country had to execute a rapid, unplanned switch to telemedicine for the majority of their consults and activities. According to one study from the RAND Corporation, there was a 20-fold increase in the rate of telemedicine utilization after March 2020. For the most part, this transition was executed well and successfully, but only due to heroic levels of creativity and dedication by clinicians in every field.
With few established practices to rely on, it fell to each hospital, each department, each clinician to more or less invent ways to conduct virtual consultations in dermatology, cardiology, oncology, and more. There was much trial and error, but a commitment to rapid learning meant that the community as a whole was able to achieve a reasonable level of healthcare delivery quality to patients via the web.
Now, however, it is clear that telemedicine will be a permanent and sizeable segment of healthcare delivery; some estimate that more than 20% of healthcare from 2021 onward will be virtual. As a result, every aspect of the healthcare ecosystem must move out of an “emergency” mindset when it comes to telehealth and focus on establishing scalable, sustainable processes that ensure that a steady shift to telehealth drives equity, access, and quality. Healthcare providers themselves are actively engaged in this effort, and medical schools also now need to evolve to reflect this new normal.
Medical schools have incorporated some telehealth training into their programs in recent years, but it has tended to be ancillary. Now, it will be critical for telemedicine training to be incorporated more structurally into core curricula. What is being called “webside manner,” for instance, is significantly different to “bedside manner” and needs to be taught explicitly ?— in both a classroom setting and during clerkship rotations, as well as residencies.
Clinicians need to be taught how to establish rapport with patients whom they don’t see face to face, how to assess possible domestic abuse threats when the patient may not be able to speak freely, and how to gather emergency contact information in case there is a critical event during the consult for which the clinician needs to call emergency services. They also must learn how to take advantage of the unique opportunity that telehealth presents to closely observe and document social determinants of health by, for instance, asking patients to show the contents of their refrigerator. And they must be taught how to navigate the “digital divide” and ensure that patients without access to broadband or smartphones aren’t consigned to a lower quality of telehealth care.
COVID-19 sent telemedicine on the fast track for widespread adoption, helping doctors manage and care for their patients — especially those at high risk — during the nationwide shelter-in-place ordinance. But for patients in low-income families, there wasn’t such a simple solution.
While the ACA makes health insurance accessible for a significant number of Americans, there are still millions of vulnerable people who rely on receiving care from free clinics like CommunityHealth. So when COVID-19 hit the U.S. in March 2020 and strict shelter-in-place orders went into effect across the Chicagoland area, many low-income patients were left unable to seek basic treatment for their preexisting, ongoing, or newly-developed medical needs.
At CommunityHealth, the nation’s largest volunteer-based free clinic, we strive to deliver high-quality care to those who need it most, providing 15,000 medical and dental visits to thousands of Chicagoans who are underserved and uninsured each year. Up to 65 percent of our patients live at or below the federal poverty line, which is $24,300 for a family of four. Many also suffer from chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, which require ongoing medical treatment.
While most healthcare providers turned to telehealth solutions to continue providing care to their high-risk patients during the pandemic, we knew that many of our low-income families wouldn’t be able to download additional software in advance of a virtual visit — a common prerequisite for many telemedicine tools — or even have reliable access to high-speed internet.
What we needed was a solution that worked with any smartphone as seamlessly as possible, and an easy-to-use telehealth solution that could be rapidly deployed across our network of providers. We also needed a simple platform for physicians and, most importantly, a user-friendly and accessible solution for our patients.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, free and charitable clinics across the country quickly pivoted to telehealth to keep staff, volunteers and patients safe. A year later, the ability to provide low-income, uninsured patients with a new, more convenient way to connect with their care team has been embraced by healthcare providers and patients alike.
There’s a good reason for this almost universal adoption. Telehealth facilitates virtual video appointments with providers using a patient’s computer or smartphone. It’s a game changer for patients with transportation or mobility issues as well as those working multiple jobs or in need of childcare, or in many cases, both.
The National Association of Free & Charitable Clinics reports 67 percent of free and charitable clinics across the country successfully implemented telehealth services in response to the pandemic. Many other safety net clinics so vital for the healthcare of underserved communities in the U.S., would do they same but they are still struggling to find the funding, training and the technical assistance necessary to make telehealth viable at their facilities.
The reality is, a third of free and charitable clinics in this country have operating budgets of less than $100,000. Many rely on volunteer providers and staff, and most simply don’t have the technical or financial resources to pivot to telemedicine.
Yet for the low-income communities they serve, telehealth increases access to care. It provides patients with the flexibility to attend appointments without having to miss work and lose much-needed income, coordinate childcare, or find reliable transportation—barriers that often stand in the way of low-income patients and their healthcare.
