Healthcare professionals worldwide are turning to telemedicine as a convenient way to maintain their quality of care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Telemedicine is a growing field with many benefits. Providers can leave the office early and continue seeing patients from the comfort of their homes with minimal equipment. However, many telemedicine practices are now opting for platforms to base their virtual practices on.
A TM platform is a technology infrastructure and service that allows telemedicine to interact internally and externally with patients and other providers.
Why Do You Need a Telemedicine Platform?
Telemedicine platforms are used to interact with patients and other healthcare providers. They allow safe, private, high-quality, and HIPAA-compliant virtual medical consultations via video conferencing. HIPAA-compliant means that they must be secure, private, and have high-resolution video and audio of both parties involved. High-speed internet is also another requirement.
The critical elements of a telemedicine platform ensure consistent and quality performance. They allow TM providers to coordinate appointment requests, schedule timings, and fix technical issues. They also help coordinate video communication technology, such as fixed or movable cameras, fixed or portable mics, multiple accessories, screen sharing, and annotation capabilities.
Telemedicine platforms are also constantly evolving to the requirements of the practitioners and thus allow for lesser training times and faster implementation. They also easily will enable a performance overview to measure the quality of care through analytics and metrics so virtual practices can improve their services.
How Telemedicine Platforms can Optimize Your Practice
Telemedicine has increased to historic levels in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare providers and physicians increasingly embrace the bigger picture and have combined the various available telemedicine services into a single and complete solution. These telehealth platforms deliver all the advantages of practicing TM within a single, customizable, configurable package.
TM platforms are a cloud-based care delivery solution, making the best possible use of modern consumer and network technology. There are three kinds of telemedicine platforms that clinicians can choose from.
- Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offers virtual healthcare facilities the use of a specific piece of TM software.
- Infrastructure-as-a-Service or IaaS offers practitioners the use of hardware and software.
- Platform-as-a-Service offers practitioners the whole package, i.e., software, hardware, internet connectivity tech support, and patient portals.
Benefits of Using a Telemedicine Platform
A telemedicine platform should assist healthcare providers in achieving all of the strategic and performance goals they want to accomplish. While conducting virtual medical consultations is what a TM platform should enable, it should also empower healthcare providers to optimize organizational and medical capabilities.
Telemedicine kits, carts, cameras, EMR integration, and clinicians are vital for your virtual practice but are not all you need. Implementation, scalability, security, and measurable outcomes are also needed for a successful migration to TM. Since telemedicine allows providers to implement, customize and optimize a vast range of telehealth services according to their requirements, it can offer your healthcare practice many advantages:
- Convenience is the most apparent benefit of using a telehealth platform. The types of platforms available vary on convenience, but it comes down to specific scenarios. Many of the most popular TM platforms offer all the services you need for implementation, such as software, hardware, scheduling, engagement tools, tech support, and administration.
- Security is another great benefit to using TM platforms. Since most platforms are cloud-based they are entirely secure. You can choose a platform that has the best amount of security for your requirements and resources. This allows virtual healthcare facilities to be able to secure their data according to HIPAA guidelines.
- TM platforms are made to optimize tasks in your practice. Your telehealth platform service provider will allow you to approve their service while they help streamline all software and hardware issues and troubleshoot if errors occur. The data remain also hosted on cloud servers, so you don’t have to access it solely from a local server.
- These platforms also allow virtual healthcare providers to scale their TM solutions efficiently. You need to keep track of future scalability with a TM platform so you can expand your services as your number of patients increases.
- Telemedicine platforms also offer your service the chance to implement a branding campaign for your organization. This includes the online portals and devices used by both clinicians and patients. This can help boost patience, confidence, and trust, as well as boosting your image.
Telemedicine platforms are an essential offering in today’s technology-rich healthcare environment. They allow providers to customize and tailor the remote care they offer to their patients’ needs. Telehealth platforms allow telemedicine providers to deliver more care into the home and help to balance the technological and service aspects of innovation in medicine.