Welcome to this week’s healthcare Knowledge Knugget! As a part of “The Executive Innovation Show” podcast, we’re bringing you the hot topics, questions we receive each week and game-changing ideas, best practices and tips. During today’s topic, Carrie Chitsey talks about how telemedicine improves the quality of care for patients.
How Does Telemedicine Improve Quality of Care
As we look at a post COVID world, how has telehealth improved the quality of care for patients? With forced telehealth adoption of both patients and physicians, this has really shed a light on access to care for those who live in rural demographics, FQHCs, and population health who may have not had access to care previously. With COVID, and the effort to keep patients safe, this prompted Medicare and Medicaid to unlock codes and make care more accessible while keeping patients at home and safe.
Improving Patient Quality of Care with Telehealth
Now, you see specialty providers who have moved to 80 to 90% telemedicine. Telehealth has allowed physicians to continue care for existing patients and the most vulnerable. How do we keep patients out of the hospital and reduce hospital admissions during COVID? When you look at the quality of care for high risk patients that have chronic care, whether that’s cardiology, nephrology, pulmonology or even oncology, telehealth helps keep them at home.
This has also led to more touch points with patients, whether in a dialysis center or cancer center. Physicians and providers who would normally only see these patients once a month or once a quarter are being more proactive. Proactive care for the patients population that have chronic conditions are now hearing more from their doctors during COVID.
Save Patients and Providers Time
With the average telemedicine program appointment being only 4 to 7 minutes, more touch points are now available. The average patient spends two hours and 15 minutes going to an in-person appointment, but only spends five minutes with the provider. With telemedicine, you are able to free up providers time. Instead of going room to room they are able to still provide patient care in real time.
Building Proactive Relationships with Providers
Lastly, when you look at populations who use the ER as their primary care such as population or Medicaid patients, telehealth allows them to establish a relationship with a primary care provider. So now, they can use telehealth and see their primary care provider with a more proactive approach instead of reactive. This not only improves quality of care but also reduces healthcare costs.
You can see the benefits of telehealth services on many fronts from not only chronic care patients but also behavioral health, primary care and much more. Telemedicine paves the way for the improvement in quality of care across the industry.
Watch the on-demand webinar “Best Practices: Virtual Telehealth Patient Handoff Workflows” and listen to the healthcare podcasts where we talk about all the use cases for telehealth. Subscribe to the podcast and rate us! Have a Knowledge Knugget idea? Reach out and submit today.