How to Start A Telemedicine Practice

If healthcare providers don’t learn how to properly start a telehealth business, they may miss an opportunity to boost their healthcare practice to its maximum potential. According to eMarketer research, it’s forecasted that telehealth will become a typical complementary service to in-person visits in the coming years. By 2025, more than 43% of Americans are expected to become telehealth users.

Check out some valuable recommendations on how to stay ahead of the healthcare industry curve and what healthcare management software will work best for your telehealth journey.

1. Create an Explicit Vision

Before starting a telemedicine practice, you need to specify a work plan, including what stages you will go through and what outcomes you expect after each stage.

Consider using the following stages as the foundation for your telemedicine program’s successful rollout: assessment, planning, and implementation.

The timeline below illustrates the steps you can take for more precise decision-making and fewer adjustments during each stage.

2. Determine Your Readiness for Telehealth

Integrating telemedicine into your medical practice requires meaningful investment, preparation, and training. You need to define your weak spots and limitations and find ways to overcome them. To determine whether you’re ready to implement telehealth appointments into your practice, answer the following questions:

• Does a telemedicine program align with your practice’s goals?
• What are your general technical skills?
• Have you ever tried remote healthcare solutions?
• What is your expected telehealth program budget?
• What are your available funding sources?
•  What is your estimated timeline for the telemedicine program’s implementation?

Additionally, by creating a strict work plan, you’ll better understand what to do and can plan your actions accordingly. You should consider the following questions when creating your work plan:

• Where do you want to provide telehealth appointments: at your home or your office?
• How and through what channels will you update your patients about the telehealth services (emails, social media networks, website updates, etc.) you offer?
• How do you want to educate your patients about telehealth? For example, you could post educational content on your social media accounts or send informative emails to your patients.
• Which channels can patients use to access your virtual services? For example, you could have a booking link on your website and social media accounts or share a link by email.
• What is the best reimbursement model for your practice?

3. Check Your State Regulations

Patients have concerns when entrusting their personal data to healthcare providers. That’s why following HIPAA regulations on telehealth is a must.

Before introducing telehealth into your practice, ensure your remote care services are secure and patient privacy is protected. Take your time and immerse yourself in the rules and regulations that control your medical practice. You can start by researching on:

•  Medicare plans
• Medicare telemedicine fact sheet for healthcare providers
• A state medical board
• CMS. Telehealth services

4 Set Your Targets and KPIs

Develop short- and long-term goals for your telehealth program and consider ways to measure your progress toward these goals. For example, your goal may be to decrease your patient wait times and last-minute cancellations and reduce your no-show rate

Defining your key performance metrics is crucial to seeing your progress as you introduce a telehealth program into your practice.

Here’re some metrics to help you gauge your telehealth program’s performance:

5 Find The Right Technology Partner for You

Based on your telehealth program’s goals and capacity, decide on the requirements (legal and technical) your chosen healthcare management software should meet and what functionality your chosen software should offer. This will enable you to narrow down the list of available solutions on the market and select the right vendor for your practice.

To make an informed choice, evaluate your telehealth software according to these criteria:

• Functionality that meets your practice’s needs, such as online booking, client management, automated payments, and file sharing.
• Reasonable subscription plan
• Easy installation
• Free setup and user onboarding
• Built-in billing and payment management
• HIPAA compliance
• 24/7 customer support

6 Redesign Your Workflow

Your new telehealth workflow should cover all aspects of your telemedicine program’s lifecycle, from the preparation and pre-visit stage to the appointment and post-visit activities. There are plenty of tasks to consider in your workflows, such as scheduling, triage protocols, payments, communication criteria, and virtual patient examinations.

You can use visualization techniques (such as flowcharts) to help integrate a telehealth program into your current workflow with as little disturbance as possible and better prepare your patients for virtual appointments. Complete the following steps to create your efficient telehealth workflow:

• Choose software that has secure data storage
• Decide on a method to receive and store patient consent
• Ensure your license matches patients’ locations
• Optimize your schedule for virtual visits
• Determine triage protocols
• Implement telemedicine healthcare guidelines and protocols
• Create documents for virtual appointments
• Choose your preferred billing method
• Perform a HIPAA compliance risk assessment
• Identify ways to gather patient feedback

7 Measure Patient Experience

Healthcare providers should test the quality of every telemedicine workflow stage by accumulating patient feedback. Patient feedback will give physicians a clear insight into whether the telehealth program runs well and meets patients’ needs and expectations.

You can create various feedback form formats, such as digital surveys, and send them to your patients immediately after their appointment to evaluate patient satisfaction.

Patient feedback forms can be stored on your telemedicine platform so you can frequently check your ratings and take action to upgrade your virtual services.

Check out how collecting patient feedback can benefit your medical practice:

• Higher patient retention rate. Surveys allow you to understand what made a patient keep coming back.
• Reduced patient leakage. Feedback forms can highlight the most common issues patients face and allow you to make immediate adjustments.
• Improved personal medical reputation. Equipped with patient feedback, you can alter your approach to provide higher quality telehealth services, improve patient satisfaction, and gain your patients’ trust.

Launch Your Telemedicine Practice With A Dedicated Technology Partner

It may be challenging to start integrating telehealth solutions into your everyday workflow. However, having a trusted technology vendor makes the adoption process relatively smooth, easy, and more efficient.

By opting for a full-featured platform such as ExpertBox, you’ll get superior functionality to cover the needs of your medical practice, from online scheduling and appointment management to secure chat, convenient video conferencing, and automated payments.

Check how to start providing efficient telehealth services and manage everything in one place, from appointments to notifications and payments, using ExpertBox medical practice management software.