Being ruthlessly attacked by microscopic organisms in late 2019, one morning, humankind woke up to find an essentially different world around them. A world whose survival critically depended on the ability of people to drastically limit if not totally suspend for an indefinite time all personal contacts.
If it had happened a couple of decades ago, we would have been doomed to stay marooned in our apartments isolated from our friends and family, putting on stand-by work and entertainment, shopping, and studying. Luckily, the across-the-board advent of Industry 4.0 has cushioned the pandemic blow and enabled people to “stay tuned” in all spheres of our activity, largely switching the majority of domains to the remote mode.
The healthcare system that is still bearing the brunt of the assault inflicted by the plague is naturally one of the trailblazers in onboarding various medical solutions enabling remote communication between doctors and patients. Telemedicine is one of such disruptive technologies that has proved to be extremely advantageous to all stakeholders of the healthcare workflow in our post-COVID next normal.
Chief benefits of introducing telehealth software
This brainchild of the IT revolution promises a number of boons both to medical organizations and consumers of healthcare services.
Keeping people separated
Maintaining social distance has become the main halter on the spread of the global scourge and telehealth fits this mission perfectly. Interacting with doctors from the safety of their disease-proof lodgings, people minimize contagion threats and mitigate the transmission rate of COVID or any other highly catching illness, for that matter. And this benefits not only patients but also clinicians who are a category of people with the greatest contamination risk.
Cost-efficiency
With no need to visit the medical facility in person, people save on parking fares, gas, and other travel-related expenses. Likewise, they don’t have to buy meals or snacks while waiting for their turn at the hospital.
Time-saving
In our hectic world with dozens of errands to do every day, it may be challenging for many busy people to find a blank spot in their overcrowded schedules for visiting a doctor. The same is true of parents looking after several kids (or a baby) and adult children taking care of elderly folk. By leveraging telehealth apps, they can get a consultation at any time they (and the doctor) find convenient.
Enhanced accessibility
For people living in rural areas, getting access to high-quality medical services is always a problem. Or it was a problem until telehealth extended those on par with individuals hailing from urban communities with developed infrastructure and a robust transportation system.
Augmenting patient privacy
Some patients may feel ill at ease while visiting a hospital on a sensitive health issue. They don’t want to run a risk of meeting acquaintances there and having to share personal aspects of men’s or women’s health. Telehealth consultations enable total privacy of virtual visits.
Prompt handling of standard or minor issues
Sometimes, a patient needs advice on treating some slight indisposition or their disease is quite evident and doesn’t require a close examination and conducting multiple tests. When such patients throng the hospital, they take up valuable time that doctors could spend on more serious cases. Telemedicine allows to solve these problems on short notice and let clinicians direct their efforts where they are more needed.
Time-saving
In our hectic world with dozens of errands to do every day, it may be challenging for many busy people to find a blank spot in their overcrowded schedules for visiting a doctor. The same is true of parents looking after several kids (or a baby) and adult children taking care of elderly folk. By leveraging telehealth apps, they can get a consultation at any time they (and the doctor) find convenient.
Mitigating the shortage of doctors
With the pandemic showing scarce sights of abatement, medical facilities worry, making doctors toil away over time. Moreover, many physicians suffered from infection, which considerably reduced the pool of available specialists. Virtual treatment helps to serve more patients by the same or even dwindling number of doctors, which is vital during epidemic spikes.
As you see, some benefits relate to the patient and some to the doctor’s side of the medicare process. However, since the overarching goal is improving the quality of healthcare, it is patients who ultimately win by participating in telemedicine. What solutions are likely to boost their experience most of all?
Six telehealth solutions that push the patients’ envelope
DICEUS, a long-time player in the healthcare field that has delivered multiple medtech projects, keeps its fingers on the vibrant pulse of the industry. Here is the list of telehealth technologies to improve patient experience that will shape the face of the realm for years to come.
Telehealth solution 1 — Online scheduling
In the epoch of profound digitalization, when we can book tickets, order a pizza, or make a hotel reservation online, it would be strange indeed if arranging a visit to a doctor couldn’t be performed along the same lines. Realizing the demands of time, healthcare facilities introduce online appointment scheduling where patients can employ their desktop or smartphone to choose a calendar slot that will be most convenient for them.
More advanced telehealth solutions don’t stop at that. Specialized apps act as a virtual portable waiting room accompanying and guiding a person before and during their visit to the hospital. They send personalized notes to remind of the appointment date or necessary tests, provide follow-up on their requests, and encourage feedback to promote communication between patients and clinicians.
Telehealth solution 2 — Store and forward solutions
In the early third millennium, mobility reigns supreme. Patients aren’t bound to a single location when it goes about being examined by a specialist, passing lab tests, undergoing therapy, taking X-rays, or receiving any other medical service. They travel to places where they can get access to state-of-the-art medical equipment or consult a more qualified specialist.
Telehealth software, known as store and forward technologies, facilitates the exchange of patient data between medical institutions (or departments of one institution) so that diagnosing and treatment prescription could be more knowledgeable. Moreover, this kind of software rules out the necessity for an individual seeking medical help to be present at all venues and stages of discharging healthcare services.
Telehealth solution 3 — Electronic health records
Not so long ago, patients didn’t come to visit a hospital empty-handed. They lugged along their bulky medical histories that grew ever thicker over time. Doctors had trouble finding the data they needed in these unwieldy folders. In case any of its content was mislaid, left in one of the numerous examination rooms and wards a patient visited and stayed, or just lost by absent-minded stakeholders, this indiscretion spelled a job of work for the person and clinicians to restore the missing information.
Digitalization has put an end to these awkward practices by ushering in electronic health records (EHR). Now, the entire personal health data with open access for all specialists that give a 360 view of an individual’s present and historical condition is kept in one virtual place without the risk of losing any of it. Moreover, both patients and physicians don’t need to fill out an endless string of paper forms, which introduces an environment-friendly approach to record-keeping to boot.
Telehealth solution 4 — Remote health monitoring
Modern healthcare strategy is all about disease prevention rather than treatment. If doctors recognize an illness at an early stage, it means fewer appointments, much fewer emergency hospitalizations, shorter time in hospital, and better therapy outcomes. Such a pre-emptive approach can be implemented via continuous watching over people’s health via leveraging telemonitoring solutions as a kind of the Internet of Things.
Today, the medtech market has a broad range of various gizmos (trackers, smartwatches, glasses, wristbands, etc.) that allow monitoring the heart rate, blood pressure, hours of sleep, the distance a person walked, consumed calories, and other vital indices that manifest our physical health in palpable numbers. This wearable technology is especially important in dealing with pregnant women and high-risk patients whose critical parameters (like the level of glucose for diabetics) can serve as a clue for immediate action to be taken by medicare providers.
Another thing that makes such solutions appealing is their unique interaction potential embracing the automatic process of data transmission, a doctor’s ability to check in on the person’s state in real-time, or even live communication sessions between the stakeholders.
Telehealth solution 5 — MHealth solutions
In the 21st century, the number of mobile devices rapidly approaches the total population of the planet, with people hardly letting smartphones out of their hands. Whether this obsession is for the better or worse remains, it would be a felony not to use it for healthcare purposes.
The whole complex of medicare apps in our smartphones is versatile. We use some as online questionnaires that inquire for information (both demographic and health-related) from a person before (s)he comes to the hospital. Others remind people to take medications on time. Still, others enable live consultations with dentists or serve educational purposes on health issues.
Given the ubiquity of mobile gadgets, this sphere of telehealth is only likely to grow exponentially in the foreseeable future, adopting new functionalities ever – from online personal screening to lifestyle coaching aimed at improving a patient’s condition before surgery.
Telehealth solution 6 — Zooming in on certain patient categories
Contemporary IT advancements enable implementing a personalized approach in serving certain social and/or age groups of patients with their unique needs: school children, seniors, people with disabilities, the incarcerated, the culturally isolated, etc. The development of such telehealth software caters to the requirements of different social layers. Engineers can fine-tune this software to yield a solution that would suit each of them to a tee.
Conclusion
The digitalization drive that is the principal locomotive of technological progress has ushered a plethora of medtech products functioning in various domains of the healthcare industry. Telemedicine is an umbrella term that encompasses IT solutions for remote medicare services to a broad strata of population. The outbreak of the global pandemic has brought telehealth solutions to the forefront, turning them into a must-have of modern medical facilities.
If you want your organization to provide its customers with a satisfying patient experience, DICEUS as a reliable company with profound expertise in producing healthcare software can give you a helping hand by developing a first-class telemedicine solution of any complexity at a competitive price.
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