During a September Becker’s Hospital Review webinar sponsored by eVisit, a panel of telehealth experts discussed keys to ensuring that telehealth solutions create value for physicians. Panelists were:
- Renny Abraham, MD, adult internal medicine/pediatrics, Clarkston (Mich.) Medical Group
- Elissa Baker, RN, vice president, marketing, eVisit (Moderator)
- Kim Coleman, MD, chief medical officer, United Physicians in Bingham Farms, Mich., and owner, My ePhysicians
- Kathleen Cox, chief operations officer, ambulatory & virtual channel, Texas Health Resources in Arlington, Texas
Four key takeaways were:
- Some virtual care workflows contribute to physician burnout. According to a recent JMIR Medical Informatics study, during COVID-19, physicians who devoted more time to telemedicine versus in-person care engaged in more after-hours EHR-based work than physicians who used telemedicine more sparsely. This finding suggests that while telehealth services have benefits, they may increase providers’ burden.
“This is not great news if you’re already short-staffed,” Ms. Baker said. The webinar covered a number of concerns faced by healthcare providers today, including their biggest challenges with improving virtual care workflows. According to an audience poll, provider adoption topped the list – followed closely by system integrations and administrative capacity – confirming Ms. Baker’s sentiment.
- Having the right telehealth strategy can help with provider satisfaction. Healthcare leaders interested in devising a solid strategy for implementing telemedicine can begin by exploring key questions about the strategy. For example:
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- Find out the “language” physicians speak and adapt the value proposition to it. “Doctors speak one of three languages: financial (dollars and cents), quality or transformation,” Dr. Coleman said. “If you can figure out what’s going to resonate with them most, you can lay that [strategy] out.”
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- Present evidence that patients are looking for a hybrid experience. “Hybrid” refers to having the option of telemedicine visits with an established provider.
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- Identify the practice’s pain points and ensure the strategy addresses them. Frequently these pain points reflect staffing and revenue concerns.
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- Acknowledge perceived barriers and past experiences. For example, workflows that support in-person patient encounters may be missing from a telehealth encounter. “When we started this journey, everybody was trying to cram an in-person experience into a virtual one — and they are not the same,” Ms. Cox said.
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First, pick a handful of use cases and expand from there. An example of starting small may be: “We would like to use telemedicine to improve blood pressure control by offering virtual checks in hypertensive patients.”
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- Telehealth done right can boost provider revenues. Integrating virtual care workflows can have financial upside for physicians because in many instances patients have urgent questions that do not require a complete televisit. If the modality is set up to assign financial value to such interactions, providers can answer quick queries during their downtime and get paid for it.
“Imagine you’re at your kid’s soccer game and the game is boring and you mark yourself as available to see patients in the eVisit platform on your phone. When you turned on eVisit, a patient asked a question about their medicine and you [answered it] and made 50 bucks for that call. Our average phone calls are about three minutes, including documentation,” said Dr. Abraham, whose organization uses eVisit to deliver virtual care.
- Telehealth integrations can deliver efficiencies and a positive ROI for organizations. For a fully operational telehealth solution that delivers value to all parties, telehealth integrations must happen on three levels:
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- With the electronic health record, so that clinicians do not have to switch between virtual platforms to deliver care and EHR systems to document that care.
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- Through unified communication, so that patients receive the same information regardless of channel and providers avoid having to field calls from confused patients.
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- With language services to ensure access is not inhibited for patients whose first language is not English.
Learn more about eVisit here.
