Hello everybody, and welcome to today’s Knowledge Knugget brought to you by One Touch Telehealth. We’re going to be talking today about growing family practice groups with telehealth. A lot of family practice groups across the U.S. Are trying to figure out the new normal of seeing patients in person as well as still accommodating telehealth. One of the key mistakes that we’re seeing across family practice groups is practices going back to seeing patients only in person. There are many ways to market new patients, as well as retain existing patients with telehealth. It’s not one or the other. It’s a new blended environment, a hybrid telehealth model. So family practice groups should look at their appointment types and look at patient demands for telehealth and convenience when determining what needs to come in person and what should be offered as telehealth. So let’s go through a few things to look out for family practice groups.
After-hours Calls Moved To Telehealth
If you’re talking to patients after hours or like some family practice groups have clinics on the weekend, being able to do that virtually is a big way to not only service your patients. Have them avoid urgent care and other clinics and have them go to a consumer-based telehealth platform. If they had a choice going to their actual family practice versus a doctor that they don’t know, they’ll make that sacrifice if the convenience is there every time.
Family Practice Groups Expanding Across Physical Locations
As you look at expanding across the physical locations and as you focus on getting patients that are beyond your radius and driving distance. You start being able to offer services to patients that have moved farther away. Instead of losing them, offering a telehealth solution for those patients will allow you to increase the number of younger patient demographics. Are there colleges around? Are there young employer groups around? Are there busy professionals or busy moms that you could be doing telehealth with?
Telehealth and Referrals
The third thing is allowing you to do those referrals instantly through telehealth having a digital lobby on your website while being able to do those things instantaneously to build relationships through video. Or help get new patients, get referrals and allow that word of mouth to spread.
Determining Appointment Types
The last thing I want to talk about is as you look at your appointment types, as you look at your low acuity your cold, your flu, your rash, your allergies, things like that, those are the things that can be moved to telehealth That’ll free up your waiting room to be able to see more patients. Typically it’s a three to one ratio, you can see three patients via telehealth to one in person. It takes out a lot of the workload of having the front desk, the nurse the checkout process, doing all that via telehealth. In addition, if you’re running any labs and there’s a follow-up appointment to talk to the patient, blood work, x-rays, and other things like that. Medication refills can also be an appointment type that can be used for telehealth.
You can talk to the patients via telehealth to see if there are any symptoms or to see if there are any changes that need to be addressed. Again, as you look at family practice groups, and you look at telehealth, there’s a lot of innovative ways to expand your patient base and your reimbursement while gaining on average 20% operational efficiencies. Embracing telehealth for family practice groups and not just going back to the way things were pre-pandemic, allows you to not only have a win-win for the providers and administrators, but also the patients that got used to telehealth during the pandemic and post-pandemic. The convenience of taking an hour and a half trip to a doctor’s office versus a seven-minute telehealth appointment is a great benefit to many.
That’s today’s Knowledge Knugget, as always please subscribe to get your podcast delivered weekly to your inbox and if you have any questions or topics you’d like us to discuss, please let us know. We look forward to seeing you next week.
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