Benefits of Telemedicine for Chronic Care
Today’s next-generation telemedicine platforms help providers better serve their chronic care patients by enabling care to be delivered both on-demand and scheduled, providing flexibility and increased accessibility to patients. With care being delivered online by physicians, mid-level providers, and other care extenders, providers can improve resource utilization with a goal of reducing the cost of care. Using these advanced telemedicine tools allows providers to increase patient engagement and improve patient adherence, thereby achieving better outcomes. The key benefits of telemedicine for chronic care include:
Improved Patient Care and Engagement
Manage Complex Patients More Effectively
For patients with complex conditions, physically getting to see clinicians can be hard. Telemedicine provides flexibility and increased accessibility for those whom location-based services are impractical, allowing providers to keep tabs on chronic and fragile patients and provide greater and timely access to care when needed. With telemedicine, the burden is reduced for patients and their support systems.
Continuity of Care
For stable chronic patients, telemedicine enables them to access diagnostic, therapeutic, and educational support in a timely, convenient manner, ensuring continuity of care and improving treatment adherence.
Treatment of Comorbidities
When patients who are immobile or difficult to transport, and yet are required to see multiple providers, some co-morbidities are either not recognized or patients simply do not seek care. Mental health services are a common missing element of care that can easily be delivered without patients ever leaving their homes, and virtual visits are often preferred by patients because of their convenience and privacy. And with effective treatment of these mental health conditions, overall patient status generally improves.
Reduced Cost of Care/Improved Resource Allocation
More Efficient Staff Utilization
Telemedicine enables health systems to better distribute staff throughout their healthcare facilities and load-balance resources across entire systems, reaching more patients with less strain on specialist resources. Mid-level providers and other professionals such as dietitians, pharmacists, speech therapists, and others, can engage patients more routinely and cost-effectively to enhance care and deliver better outcomes.
Medication Management
It is important to monitor patients who are on medications, especially for long-term treatment, but it can be burdensome to require office visits to achieve it. Telemedicine is a convenient and cost-effective way to ensure that treatment is effective and that any side effects are mitigated in a timely fashion.
Reduced Hospital Readmissions
By improving follow-up care and care management of chronically ill patients, hospitals can prevent readmissions, thereby greatly lowering medical costs. For instance, a brief ten-minute virtual medication reconciliation the day after discharge can prevent poly-pharmacy issues that could result in a readmission. When the telemedicine program includes both remote patient monitoring and virtual visits, patient status can be determined, and patients with declining status can be evaluated and treatment strategies can be adjusted or patients can receive further education or reminders about their care management plan.
Improved Outcomes
Population Health Asset Leverage
By leveraging the population health assets within a health system, providers can now identify those high-cost and high-risk patients who may benefit from more intensive management. With increased access to convenient care, patients can be more adherent with their treatment program, resulting in improved outcomes. Studies have demonstrated the benefit of both chronic care management and remote patient monitoring programs as a means to improve patient care and associate outcomes.
The GlobalDoc iQ Telehealth Chronic Care Telemedicine Solution
GlobalDoc iQ’s Telehealth platform platform offers health systems and providers a complete virtual clinic to easily launch online services. Our industry-leading digital exam room provides all the tools to engage patients in one click and fully document the encounter. With advanced capabilities such as high-resolution screen sharing, file transfer, and digital diagnostic tools, the VCM software platform allows healthcare providers with chronically ill patients to deliver convenient and timely care to their patients anywhere – just as if they were in the clinic exam room.
Key features of the GlobalDoc iQ Telehealth platform for chronic care include:
Powerful rules engine for intelligent workflow, with customized rules that can control patient registration, ensure patients are routed to clinicians who are appropriately licensed to comply with jurisdiction requirements, or routed to care teams focused on chronic conditions.
Enterprise-level dynamic scheduling systems enable appointment scheduling by providers, administrative staff, or directly by patients themselves, as well as true on-demand encounters facilitated via a unified patient queue vs. the antiquated, one-dimensional, booking-based approach.
High-definition video for virtual digital exams that can support multi-participant and/or clinician-to-clinician sessions, enabling timely care and decision-making.
Seamless integration into existing workflows and EHRs.
Market-leading compliance adherence and security layers, including HIPAA, HITECH, GDPR and COPPA-compliant software, combined with complete logging of all transactions, with data available for extraction to meet audit requirements.
