Telemedicine is a form of supply of care services through the use of telecommunications technology as a mode of delivery of care services. It gives an opportunity to prescribe health improvement plans and/or treatment, as well as, follow up patient’s conditions through the use of telecommunications machinery other than within a formal medical setting.
To healthcare businesses, it’s not just a splendid invention – it’s a marvelous business prospect that combines higher patient satisfaction rates, lower operational costs and potential branching-out in revenue streams. In this article, we’ll explain what telemedicine is, how it has evolved over time and why can it truly revolutionize your healthcare business.
What is Telemedicine?
Telemedicine is defined as the use of information telecommunication, and communication technology in the delivery of healthcare services with or without the presence of face-to-face communication. Through telemedicine, healthcare providers can:
- Diagnose and treat illnesses.
- Provide an opportunity for consultations after giving advice.
- Ensure the implementation of home based telemonitoring of Critical Chronic Illnesses (CCI) patients.
- Offer mental health therapy.
- Include information for the patient and prevention consultation advice.
Telemedicine should not be confused with telehealth because the latter term is an overarching category that includes all forms of meetings, educations, monitoring, and healthcare delivery through the use of information technology. Telemedicine is more or less specifically targeted in the clinical services that are offered remotely.
How Does Telemedicine Work?
Telemedicine is the use of smart phones, tablets, computers and internet to provide access to use advanced technology for patient-physician interaction. It typically involves a few key components:
- Virtual Consultations: Patients can make an appointment with their healthcare provider and interact through video conferential application. This enables the doctors to examine the need of the patients, counsel them, write prescriptions or when required intimate the patient to see a specialist.
- Remote Monitoring: Mobile health applications share device based biomarkers, for instance, wearable technology or home health monitoring systems which capture and relay health information including blood pressure or pulse rates to the providers. This is especially beneficial in chronic conditions seeing that compliance with medication taken at a given interval is often a challenge.
- Asynchronous Communication: Also known as “store-and-forward,” this one lets the patient and the healthcare providers share information (such as test results or a patient’s past medical history) without having to do so in real time.
- Telemedicine Apps: Some of the applications are specific, common applications, and are customized to fit into various healthcare organizations. They can have features as scheduling, prescription management, and patient portals, having no gap in the process for both the provider and the patient.
The Advantages Of Telemedicine for Healthcare Businesses
Businesses and healthcare providers stand to benefit from telemedicine in several ways, at the level of patient care as well as facility management. Here are some of the key ways telemedicine can boost healthcare businesses:
1. Increased Access to Care
Telemedicine erases time and space division. Technically, this means that many patients from rural or poorly served areas can obtain health-care services they could not previously get. This increased customer base enables the healthcare providers to pose a wide network of patients, without having to establish more clinics.
2. Better Patient Satisfaction and hence more patient loyalty
Modern patient is very demanding and they require that their appointments are scheduled when it is most suitable to them. Telemedicine asserts that by eradicating the necessity of travelling and long tedious waits. The opportunity to speak with a healthcare provider from the comfort of your home results in increased patient satisfaction which in turn means that patients are more likely to come back in the future.
Happy patients are even more likely to refer others to get your services, thus creating word of mouth traffic.
3. This paper aims at considering the following objectives:
Telemedicine reduces overhead expenses for the health practitioners because it is not contingent on bricks and mortar and human resource. Virtual consultations take less resources hence enabling the healthcare businesses to deliver their services effectively. In the same way, telemedicine reduces chisel appointment no-shows since it is easier for the patient to make arrangements to attend a virtual appointment than schedule for an in-appropriate physical visit.
These kinds of savings can then be utilized to invest in service enhancement, adoption of newer forms of delivery, or advertising to increase the amount of patients coming through the doors.
4. More Revenue Opportunities
Telemedicine also creates the possibility of numerous new sources of income. It now allows, for example, healthcare providers to get paid for teleconsultations, remote monitoring, and similar. Some of the telemedicine platforms also have specific service delivery modes where the patient pays for the regular remote check-up or wellness programmed.
Telemedicine also helps the problem, which existing practices estimate as a substantial loss, which increases the nonattendance rate. The implication is that having more consistent appointments enable the healthcare providers to make most of their revenue.
5. Chronic Diseases Management
Diabetic, Cardiovascular or Hypertensive patients especially requires consistent check up. helps the physicians to observe the patients’ conditions regularly and attend to them when the signs are minor but the health complications extreme. This prevention act results in improved patient status and minimal readmissions to the hospital.
Given the current situation of healthcare being a business, providing telemedicine solutions for chronic disease management offers you a unique selling proposition while serving the need of your patients.
6. Greater Operational Capacity
Telemedicine increases operational efficiency in health care since a large number of consumers can be tended to within the shortest time possible. A sequence of virtual appointments can be set right after the others, and repeating consultations can be coordinated differently, without the necessity for patients’ visits to the clinic.
The objective clinical approach to optimizing the delivery of healthcare facilities means that physicians could effectively schedule their time and manpower and at the same time, attend to a higher patient turnover in a single day.
7. Prepare Your Healthcare Business for the Future
Telemedicine has received much growth in the recent past, especially during the COVID-19 outbreak where telemedicine became a dominant trend in healthcare. Such strategy taken now translate practically to mean preparing a healthcare business to adapt to the anticipated future telemedicine healthcare.
Early adopters of telemedicine will be better placed to deliver telemedicine services that match the changing customer needs and demands, along with new policy adjustments.
How to Telemedicine in Your Healthcare Practice
It is easier than you might expect to incorporate telemedicine into your healthcare business model. The main tasks, therefore, are to select the suitable platform, onboard your employees for virtual care, and raise your patients’ awareness on the opportunities of virtual care respectively.
Choose the Right Platform: Ensure that an ideal telemedicine solution works well with the other software in your practice. These platforms should include; secure video call, messaging, remote monitoring or appointment setting.
Train Your Team: For anyone to use the tools mentioned in the steps above, your staff are going to require training on how to use the tools effectively. This encompasses such areas as scheduling of virtual consultations, protection of patient’s identity and security of patient information.
Educate Your Patients: Make sure you inform your patients about the provision of telemedicine services. Discuss how virtual care can be advantageous such as, convenient, time effective and enhances healthcare consultation.
Ready to Boost Your Healthcare Business with Telemedicine?
Telemedicine is the future of healthcare. However, adopting it now is the smart choice for growing your practice footprint, enhancing patient encounter satisfaction, lowering expenses, and generating new revenue.
Telemedicine provides many advantages to healthcare firms whether they are small clinics or large organizations; those advantages are notably potential sources of growth and success.
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FAQ
Telemedicine is the provision of healthcare services using telecommunications technology to reach individuals at a distance. It enables doctors, nurses or whoever is dealing with patients to assess, manage and follow up on patients and within the comfort of their docket.
One often reported advantage of telemedicine is less patient mobility and this results in higher patient satisfaction. The patient receives care at the preferred time, and also at the desired location, thus improving the care experience.
Some vendors of telemedicine solutions use encryption and follow the rules of local legislation like HIPAA (in the USA).
Telemedicine being able to deliver healthcare with significantly less physical office space makes it less expensive than a traditional facility-based model. Further, it eliminates patient no-show rates and even travel cost of patients who otherwise would be coming for routine checkups.
Telemedicine made it possible to monitor patients, and attend to other conditions like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular issues on a regular basis. This is very useful in the treatment of the symptoms and preventing and the relapse of the complications.