Benefits of Telehealth to Drive the Healthcare Industry
The COVID-19 pandemic has been an eye-opener for everything that matters in both professional and personal life. Healthcare professionals are facing challenges like balancing patient care, reworking guidelines to safeguard their data, and much more. These challenges are easy to overcome using telehealth technology.
Telehealth platforms are revolutionizing primary healthcare by offering a myriad of benefits that reshape healthcare service delivery. These platforms provide convenience with innovation, seamlessly connecting doctors and patients. Because of this, the demand for developing telehealth solutions is increasing.
Due to several benefits of mobile health apps, healthcare units are fostering telehealth solutions. In this context, we will discuss the primary advantages of telehealth in evolving the healthcare industry. So, let’s dive in and explore!
What is Telehealth?
Telehealth is one of the ways of accessing healthcare services using modern technology and without visiting the doctor in person. Also known as an online healthcare portal that lets you connect with your doctor or other relevant medical professionals from your comfortable spot.
As per the World Health Organization, telehealth is used for:
Using technology to provide enhanced healthcare services to patients
Accessing healthcare when and wherever required
Skip the geographical barriers to accessing medical services
Enhance the treatments and ultimately improve the health conditions of patients.
What Treatments can Patients get from Telehealth?
Both ongoing and temporary health conditions can be timely treated using telehealth and telemedicine technologies. Some of them are:
Acute health conditions like urgent care for fever, cough & cold, infections, sore throat, allergies, nausea and vomiting, bronchitis, and many more
Chronic health conditions like migraine, high BP, urinary tract infections, cholesterol, diabetes, skin diseases, after-surgery follow-ups, and many more
Medical management like medical maintenance, prescription management, virtual appointments and counseling, online therapy, X-rays and lab reports, and much more.
Benefits of Telehealth in Healthcare Industry
Here are the primary benefits of the telehealth industry:
Increased Flexibility
While scheduling a healthcare appointment, patients must keep in mind a variety of personal barriers like traveling time, physical challenges, location differences, childcare, and many more.
Telehealth reduces the need to physically visit the healthcare unit and its accompanying problems like traveling, etc., and increases flexibility in normal or emergencies.
Telehealth Can Increase Your Patient Base
Using telemedicine, a patient gets convenient healthcare services from their comfortable location. It allows multiple patients to access healthcare services or specialists they wouldn’t be able to take treatment from.
Doctors take advantage of this system by increasing their patient group and strengthening relations with current patients. Telemedicine allows doctors to virtually meet patients outside their locations, which is especially effective for professionals who provide:
Specialist referral
Primary care services
Remote monitoring
Medical Education
Consumer health and medical info
Telehealth also offers huge competitive benefits over medical services in your area. This means providing new service that makes the professionals more accessible to patients, it can help you get new patients who are going for other healthcare providers.
Improves Patient Engagement
Telehealth allows you to access digital services using digital devices such as laptops, smartphones, etc., that can keep users engaged in healthcare applications.
Using telehealth platforms, users can easily book healthcare appointments and manage relevant processes like making payments or rescheduling appointments.
They can easily interact with relevant healthcare experts using audio or video calls. Additionally, patients can seamlessly share their medical history with the care service providers and can also download medical prescriptions using mobile devices.
Telehealth is Cost-Efficient
Telemedicine offers a less expensive way to physical visits to the healthcare unit for both professionals and patients.
In a recent study, it was seen that an average visit to a doctor’s clinic can cost a minimum of $43 and additional time. Saving your time waiting in the room to communicate with the doctor can be a huge benefit for busy individuals. This feature is helpful especially when a patient is having a chronic condition requiring routine appointments.
For healthcare professionals, many telehealth platforms have built-in patient enrollment and scheduling functions that manage virtual appointment booking. There’s also an in-built system for collecting payments from patients who are virtually visiting the doctor.
In the majority of cases, time is greater than money. So, telemedicine allows physicians to perform follow-up visits or seamlessly check on patients with chronic ailments in less time than physically visiting the healthcare unit.
Virtual visits can also help you drive late appointment or no-show appointment rates, streamline your appointment schedule, and avoid wasting time.
Enhances the Provider’s Revenue
Telehealth aims to decrease the overall healthcare cost. Doctors can generate more revenue as telehealth helps them to target new patients other than the previous ones, who are located beyond borders.
Moreover, as telemedicine makes it feasible for patients to have virtual follow-ups, it leads to increased revenues from patients who were not able to visit the doctor’s clinic in-house due to certain conditions.
Hence, healthcare providers can easily notice the increased business revenue once they start adopting virtual telehealth and telemedicine options.
Improves Patient Satisfaction and generates Patient Loyalty
Virtual telehealth services support the development of a strong relationship between a doctor and a patient. From scheduling a digital appointment to paying the doctor’s bill digitally, everything is made convenient for users.
By using these manageable services, patients have to spend less time on medical care. With these healthcare services, patients spend less time on in-house visits and also save money on traveling. It ultimately results in improved patient satisfaction and generates patient loyalty.
Telemedicine is highly essential for patients residing in farther locations. It provides better healthcare choices like high-quality access to healthcare services and speedy emergency care facilities. With this ease of use, better quality, and cost savings, healthcare providers can drive patient loyalty towards them to improve patients' overall health and increase the ROI of their business.
Provides extensive telemedicine technological alternatives
If you are an organization considering developing the best telemedicine app development solution, you can use telemedicine apps. Using telehealth for primary health care can provide remote patients a better alternative to schedule an appointment with you virtually.
Organizations and hospitals can make most of the profit from such platforms as they provide different functionalities like:
Appointment scheduling & rescheduling
Online bill payment gateway
Virtual primary healthcare support in case of emergency, and much more
Other telehealth alternatives like EMRs, EHRs, etc., store the patient's data starting from their medical history, laboratory reports, ailments, treatments, etc. Based on it, doctors can even estimate their ailments at an early stage and provide relevant treatment to eradicate the disease.
Who Can Get Benefits From Telehealth?
Telehealth and telecommunication are common for all but considering the need, this technology is highly beneficial for people such as:
Patients with temporary health issues
People living in rural or remote areas where medical amenities aren’t enough to treat their ailments
People who have certain disabilities or aren’t able to physically move or travel
People suffering from various mental health issues
Patients who need to consult a specialist, but have limited access to a particular expert
Pregnant Women can also leverage telehealth and telemedicine technologies
This technology is mostly used during the times of pandemic
Potential Drawbacks of Telehealth Technology
Limited in-person examination
Live video conferencing or telecommunication technology isn’t advanced enough to allow comprehensive medical care. Today, many patients and doctors have quick access to this technology and high-quality video calling, but in certain ailments, virtual examination isn’t enough to provide treatment to the patient.
However, telemedicine can be equally effective for minor conditions where the in-house visit of a patient is completely optional. However, telehealth does provide limited in-person examination is a concern to keep in mind while working with telehealth.
Industry and Regulatory barriers
Telemedicine rules are different in different states, and it can take time to remember all the rules. Some professionals do not appreciate this difference and hence try to stay away from this technology.
Moreover, some tools of telemedicine fall in the security area, and doctors have to worry about their patient’s information and avoid situations that can cause security breaches.
Another problem in mHealth is the lack of interoperability in EHR systems which sometimes further complicates the use of telehealth.
Telemedicine Tools and Technology
Telehealth has many remote health services including chronic monitoring of patients, therapy, postoperative care, and much more. All services run on hardware and software which can be costly for healthcare organizations. It includes training costs, additional IT teams, purchasing servers, and other expenses.
Also, indeed, any modern or traditional technology we work on has certain technical glitches. If any problem arises during a virtual visit, the appointment hangs up in the middle. It’s risky enough for certain physicians to work with these glitches during the time of emergency.
In certain rural areas, one cannot expect patients to be computer literate. Also, some cannot afford the cost of devices required to use telehealth facilities. In such cases, telehealth isn’t a commonly used platform.
Final Verdict
Telehealth has different benefits that make it one of the top alternatives for doctors, other healthcare professionals, and patients for seamless access to healthcare facilities. However, one should keep in mind the drawbacks as well. For more technical updates, stay tuned with us. Till then, happy reading!