Gary Hamilton, CEO of InteliChart, a provider of patient engagement platforms, makes it clear that telehealth services can offer healthcare providers opportunities and access to more populations – and they can serve as disease prevention tools for these populations.
He added: “Telemedicine tools can ensure doctors and their care teams can better manage patient care and related workflows to help their patients stay on top of things. healthiest.
We spoke with Hamilton to discuss how telehealth can be the key to creating successful preventive care programs, how virtual care can become an epidemic prevention tool. disease and telehealth is consistent with the importance of preventive care in value-based care reimbursement models.
Q. You say Telehealth is key to creating a successful preventive care program. How is that?
ONE. Amid the pandemic, rapid adoption of telehealth has ceased to be necessary as the rules and regulations regarding face-to-face patient visits are an ever-changing goal. While the value of telehealth today continues to revolve around improving patient access, convenience now also plays a key role in continued widespread adoption.
There is no one size fits all when it comes to convenience. For example, determining convenience for a 22- to 45-year-old demographic with a 9- to 5-hour job might be impacted by not being able to take a day off work to see a doctor.
However, from a prevention standpoint, telehealth really does work for patients who have more difficulty accessing it. This may be related to transportation-related insecurity or socio-demographic issues.
For example, some aging populations may need to coordinate transportation with family members, friends, or other care services. Having telehealth used to be accessible is much more beneficial for those particular patients, especially when it is preventive in nature from a healthcare standpoint.
All that said, simply encouraging people to meet practitioners when they normally wouldn’t or couldn’t, creates a legitimate, vertical use case for telehealth.
Q. You suggest that telemedicine services can act as disease prevention tools for patient groups. Please explain.
ONE. Telehealth equips providers with tools to monitor and monitor patients remotely. In particular, providers can easily track and trace patient populations whose unique identifiers need to be addressed. Those providers are then evaluated on their ability to successfully treat those patients, which is the essence of value-based care.
One of the most challenging aspects of care is making sure patients are really getting the evaluation and treatment they need. This includes treatment under the direct supervision of a current physician and, perhaps more importantly, when such treatment involves a referral or transition of care.
During the transition, telehealth provides patients with more options for provider access, increasing the likelihood that patients will continue with their referred visit. Seamless integration allows clinicians to access all the tools and data they need with a single system, resulting in cost savings and workflow efficiency – while providing a Convenient communication for patients and providers without barriers.
By automating and streamlining manual workflows, telehealth tools can free up staff and providers to respond quickly and proactively interact with patients. When a patient comes in for an in-person appointment, there are multiple workflows involved with the staff for that patient’s visit.
From check-in to waiting in the waiting room, to taking vital signs at the nurse’s station and finally setting up a patient’s room. All those processes create a sizable amount of work for the office staff and the care team. Telehealth requires fewer steps to process patient visits, and by creating a lighter workflow burden for providers and staff, the emphasis and focus is on the patient. employees and their problems – not the associated workflows.
Adopting telehealth as a preventive measure means making it easier for patients to reach their providers and creating a much lighter push for the provider organization to bring that visit again. The result is a situation where one or two employees can provide a telemedicine visit, while an in-person visit may require more.
When it comes to chronic disease and chronic populations, there are many factors that must be considered when managing these patients. Often, it’s managing patients about what they need to do for themselves, whether it’s taking medication or recording findings like blood sugar or blood pressure and weight at home.
The ability to deliver healthcare remotely to a patient, whenever or wherever the patient is, further facilitates proper management. You’re also more likely to get patients to adhere to prescribed care – especially if they are able to take a more active role in their own health.
Q. How does telemedicine as a disease prevention tool help doctors better manage patient care and related workflows?
ONE. With a face-to-face visit, there are often both subjective and objective findings. With telehealth, since you can’t touch the patient, providers can lose a certain degree of objective scrutiny.
In that sense, physical examination may be somewhat limited, but with telemedicine a completely different scenario is created compared to in-person examination. Telehealth focuses more on listening to patients about their condition.
That’s not to say you can’t get objective results through telemedicine, but telehealth is much more focused on the interview and that creates a unique and engaging dynamic. value between patient and provider.
In addition, the innovation and development of new telehealth tools is very exciting to see the development. For example, the development of home assessment tools such as Tyto Home enables patient assessment with stethoscopes, otoscopes, and high-definition cameras to increase the efficiency of telemedicine.
Typically, providers will have to do that type of assessment in the office. Telehealth tools are becoming more powerful by the day and enable telemedicine providers to be more advanced.
Ultimately, telehealth creates a different kind of workflow. Something less burdensome when compared to an in-person visit. It doesn’t require someone’s help to take an electrocardiogram, bring the patient in and take some movies, or perform a venipuncture to get a sample in the lab.
Telehealth is a more specific, concise assessment that requires fewer people. Thereby providing suppliers with a much more streamlined workflow. Simply put, because there are far fewer moving parts, telehealth optimizes the entire patient visit.
Q. How does virtual care fit into the importance of preventive care in value-based care reimbursement models?
ONE. When you manage a group of patients, patient performance, through specific metrics – test results, blood pressure results, etc. – affects your quality performance score. At the end of the day, anything that can be done to encourage patient care would be helpful.
Theoretically, if a provider had the ability to call patients on a daily basis and check in with them, which sounds simple enough, it would help with patient care and health outcomes. their health. Getting the patient involved to some extent will always be essential.
Most importantly, when a patient needs scheduled, repeated provider visits or because the patient develops a health problem, telehealth ensures better provider access. Maybe the problem stems from not taking a particular medication or the patient is doing something they shouldn’t be doing.
It can also happen that patients do exactly what they are prescribed, but they have an adverse reaction to the medication. That said, when patients are encouraged to participate in their care with the right tools, it allows the provider to evaluate and change direction or reinforce existing guidelines.
It is important to ensure that ongoing patient management remains intact. Managing patients when they’re not within the four walls of a doctor’s office is one of the basics for holistic patient care, not just in the context of value-based care.
What does the patient do when the patient is no longer a “patient”? It is the most fundamental challenge facing all providers, influencing patients in that dynamic. If provider organizations can provide a mechanism to interact with patients when they are not in the care of a provider, telehealth will become extremely meaningful. The ability to connect when patients are in their home, apartment, vacation, or wherever it’s convenient has a huge impact.
Impact is essential to driving value-based care. That’s an important level of involvement, and involvement can move the needle across those at-risk groups of patients in a positive direction. One vendor can try everything; they can spend a lot of money on all kinds of solutions, techniques and treatments.
In the end, if it doesn’t connect to the patient, it won’t matter. If you can give patients convenience, if you can give them accessibility, if you can give them comfort and you can apply it to preventive care , then the chances are high that you will make a big difference to their overall health results.
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