Mar 25, 2022 11:10:00 AM | 6 Min Read

How Do You Evaluate Telehealth?

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Vitel Health
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How Do You Evaluate Telehealth?

Telehealth has become a huge presence in the medical industry, with more physicians offering telehealth and more patients seeking telehealth medical visits than ever before. Because of increased interest, you might be considering adding a telehealth platform if you haven’t already made this move. Whether you are a traditional medical practice or have made the move to telehealth, there are new technologies being developed daily that can improve your practice.

With that in mind, have you stopped to consider if telehealth is working for your practice? Implementing an overhaul in your services is a significant change, and you need to know if it's benefiting you or not. Consider the following to accurately gauge whether your telehealth provider and its platform are genuinely helping your practice.

How can telehealth benefit your practice?

The first thing to understand is the areas in which telehealth platforms can benefit your existing practice. Assuming your office is brick-and-mortar, the areas in which you can benefit from telehealth include:

  • Scheduling more patient encounters seeing patients remotely 
  • Securely sending and receiving patient data
  • Interfacing with specialists, medical suppliers, pharmacies, and ancillary services 
  • Remote patient intake, including gathering vitals and reasons for visits
  • Remote patient monitoring
  • Chronic Care Management

Telehealth can help with more than just these areas of your practice, but these are some of the areas that see the biggest benefit. Having a well-established, AI-based virtual platform to handle, send, and receive data takes work off you and your staff. Additionally, a telehealth platform should add layers of security to this transmission of patient data, staying HIPAA-compliant in the process.

With that in mind, how do you evaluate if telehealth is worth the effort and expenditure? You can start by gauging each aspect of your practice to give you a clearer understanding of the direct improvement (or not) that telehealth integration has had on you, your employees, and your patients.

Data-driven analytics

You can divide evaluation into two categories from the start — data-driven metrics and perceived value gained. Data-driven information is purely numbers; the speed with which you process patients, the efficacy of accounting, and payroll discrepancies. Anything that can be empirically analyzed falls into this category.

Perceived value comes from self-reports done by patients. Surveys sent to patients who interface through your virtual visits allow them to respond on how they felt the visit went. These questions might cover:

  • Connection - can they hear and see you and communicate their issues effectively?
  • Efficacy - was this visit as good as an in-person visit, and were their needs met?
  • Interactivity - did you as the physician feel you were able to effectively communicate with your patient?
  • Efficiency - considering intake questions and wait time, was this virtual visit as valuable and more efficient as a regular office visit?

These are not the only questions, but questionnaires that include these questions as headers are a great place to start. Breaking down each of these headings using a 1-10 scale, along with composite questions, further deconstructs their responses. You can then use this data to get an overall picture of how the virtual visit and telehealth platform ranks among your patients.

Your telehealth platform should have the ability to measure these metrics for you. The platform should be able to implement, measure, and explain the data collected from patients and employees, as well as purely mathematical figures such as:

  • How telehealth lowers overhead or increases revenue across multiple factors (employee costs, energy consumption, lost patients due to decreased access or increased wait times, increased revenue from seeing more patients virtually, etc.).
  • Its effect on patient intake time
  • How long does it take for patients to be seen by a doctor on your staff
  • Accuracy and turnaround time for patient billing, physician credentialing, and employee onboarding
  • Marketing analytics (split-testing, foot traffic increase, website traffic)

Being able to assess these concepts within the platform — or independently as you see fit — can tell you if your telehealth program is actually worth the investment.

Partner with a telehealth platform you can trust

ViTel Telehealth is a platform you can trust to improve your practice across all metrics. From patient satisfaction, faster and more accurate intake, billing, and more, ViTel has it covered. Our robust network includes specialists, pharmacies, medical suppliers, insurers, and physicians across the country to make your daily operations faster and simpler.

Patients who see physicians with a telehealth component to their practice are more compliant with medication and yearly physicals. They also report better satisfaction with simply being able to see their doctors. Telehealth lets you see more patients, increasing your revenue streams — it's a win for everyone.

Our analytics can give you the information you need to determine how effective telehealth is for you and your patients. We are confident that partnering with us will help your office thrive, and we want the opportunity to show you how. Contact us today for a free demo and see what a difference ViTel can make in your practice, whether it's entirely virtual, currently fully physical, or a mix of both.

ViTel Access

Topics: Telehealth, Physicians

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