Ready to dive deeper into the subtleties of telemedicine?
In our previous post, we spoke about the basics of telemedicine and covered the essential instruments a good telemedicine platform should provide.
We will now go through some further best practices and tools that will help you maximize the benefits telemedicine has to offer:
- organize and keep track of your patients
- review and stay on top of the health data they share with you
- meaningfully address any telemedicine scenario
- handle payments
The first step to knowing your patients better is having them organized better
The key to knowing your patients better, have better relationships and in return have higher referral rate is to keep them well organized. Your preferred telemedicine solution should be in part your CRM when it comes to keeping track of your patients.
Since you most probably already have a system or two to deal with (practice management or EHR), you’d better choose the solution that makes you most productive when dealing with organizing patients. Organizing your telemedicine patients in groups, keeping notes either through writing or speech should take you seconds so that you can focus on the important stuff – your patients’ health.
Knowing your patients’ health better will lead to better outcomes
Being able to quickly check a patient’s past and present conditions, symptoms, treatments and medications, vitals signs, allergies and even lab results could lead to much better outcomes when trying to put the right diagnosis. Some platforms let patients share their health data with their doctors and some even let doctors run various reports on that data, in order to get a high-level perspective of patient’s health.
This could be especially useful when trying to help patients with chronic conditions. In such scenarios, monitoring the patient’s health data will let you react on time when a medication needs to be changed, or when a consultation is needed.
The most advanced telemedicine solutions let doctors subscribe for their patients’ health data changes so that doctors get notified when an important health indicator reaches a certain value.
It also helps a lot when these health data changes come not only when manually entered by the patient but also when they come from integrated devices.
When does an online consultation start and when does it end?
This is a no-brainer question when it comes to a regular in-person examination. The consultation starts when the patient enters the doctor’s office and it ends when the patient leaves.
It’s a bit harder when it comes to online consultations and especially for online consultations that can go through different stages. An online consultation can start with an asynchronous chat communication, later a video call could be required and it may again end with text messages.
The good telemedicine solution will lead you through the process and will provide you with all the required instruments to end a consultation when you have all the necessary information available.
Having different payment options is the right way to go
The right telemedicine platform will let you choose the right payment scenario for your particular practice.
Unfortunately, getting reimbursed for telemedicine services could vary a lot depending on your country, state and local regulations.
Don’t hesitate to request guidelines from your telemedicine provider about how to proceed in different scenarios – private payers, insurance plans, in-network providers and so on.
Some doctors prefer not to spend time dealing with reimbursement and go for the option to charge patients directly. Many patients don’t mind paying a fee for the convenience that the telemedicine service can provide.
When you go for the direct payment option, you should have the flexibility to say what payment scenario works best for your practice and specialty.
For some doctors being paid in advance works better, while others prefer to be able to talk to patients, prior to proceeding with a paid consultation.
The way to self improvement goes through getting feedback from your patients
No matter how good job you’ve done, you can never be quite sure without getting feedback from your patients. The good telemedicine platforms will urge your patients to provide feedback at the end of the consultations in order to let you know how everything has gone through the patient’s eyes. This can greatly improve your practice and you’ll be able to provide better care to your patients.
Anywhere, anytime
Knowing doctors better means knowing how busy doctors can be. Sometimes you’ll be in the office, sitting at the desk, and sometimes you’ll be on the move.
The communication with your patients doesn’t have to wait for the right time because every moment could be the right time when using the right telemedicine platform. You should be able to use your platform of choice both from your mobile device and from your desktop computer.
Find me a doctor
The first rule of becoming a better doctor is to have more patients. That’s the best way for you to gather more experience and learn more.
The most certain way for more patients to reach you is when they can easily find you. That’s why many telemedicine platforms will make your profile easily discoverable either through a web page or from within their apps.
On-boarding
Last but not least, before choosing the telemedicine platform for your practice, make sure the on-boarding process won’t take you more time than you can afford.
With Healee it will take you only minutes from the moment you’ve joined our platform, to the moment you provide your first telemedicine consultation.