Our current pandemic produced an obvious and immediate shift to increasing the distance between provider and patient, with an abrupt increase in telehealth visits. This was an easier transition for larger health organizations that had already built up the necessary infrastructure to shift to these types of visits.
Law firm Foley and Lardner identified four challenges that these smaller organizations struggle with which are, “a lack of resources, a lack of strategic decision-making, a lack of time and attention to devote to telehealth, and a lack of reimbursement opportunities.”
Part of the reason that these smaller practices weren’t devoting their time and energy to telehealth is simply that the demand wasn’t there. Not only was a need missing, though, the reimbursement schemes haven’t been worth it for many small groups until recent regulatory changes were made. It always made more sense for doctors to have patients visit them in the office.
There are also resources for practices that need help with getting their telehealth programs off the ground. The federal government has funded 14 regional telehealth resource centers that offer evaluations of telehealth technologies, give updates on policy changes, and promote best practices. The National Consortium of Telehealth Resource Centers is a great place to either start the process of implementing a program, or to better refine one that already exists.
The Department of Health and Human Service’s Office for Civil Rights has loosened some of the enforcement around telehealth technologies’ HIPAA compliance, and won’t penalize providers who are operating in good faith during the public health emergency. While this means that offices can use consumer video chatting substitutes like Skype or FaceTime, this is a temporary measure, so offices shouldn’t get too comfortable with them. These are technologies that can help bridge the gap, so to speak, but won’t ever be the foundation of a strong telehealth program.
Implementing telehealth also doesn’t have to be done as a replacement for traditional office visits, but can be used to expand capacity as well. This would include options like offering off-hours consultations or even asynchronous visits.
With all of the resources available now, not to mention an unusually high demand, this is a time when even small practices can get a viable telehealth system up and running. At Extract, we find that our software works well in tandem with telehealth. Since clinicians are pulling up patient charts as they’re speaking, they can be more successful and more attentive to the patient’s needs if discrete data is readily available in the EMR as opposed to locked into a fax or image file that needs to be searched through. We offer software that uses
optical character recognition to read all of the text on a given file, and deliver the relevant data to the patient’s file, so there’s no searching by the time a telehealth visit comes around. If you’d like to learn more about our software, please reach out today.
About the Author: Chris Mack
Chris is a Marketing Manager at Extract with experience in product development, data analysis, and both traditional and digital marketing. Chris received his bachelor’s degree in English from Bucknell University and has an MBA from the University of Notre Dame. A passionate marketer, Chris strives to make complex ideas more accessible to those around him in a compelling way.