Chances are you’ve heard all about telemedicine by now. You may even be seriously considering adding telemedicine services to your own practice.
But what physicians don’t always stop to ask themselves is exactly how adopting telemedicine is beneficial to everyone: you, your patients, your staff, and even insurance companies.
How Telemedicine Helps Physicians
You may be wondering why and how telemedicine benefits you. What many physicians don’t realize is that beyond just radically improving patient care, telemedicine can be transformative for your work-life balance and ultimately your job satisfaction.
Consider these benefits of telemedicine:
- Compensation for out-of-office time that might otherwise be unpaid, on-call hours
- Improved workflow efficiency
- Avoiding burnout
- Increased productivity
- Flexibility to work from home or the office
- Control over scheduling and downtime
- Easier time management to fit you and your patients’ needs and lifestyles
- Less overhead
If you’re asking yourself why you should go with telemedicine, just take a look at that list. These are just a few of the many benefits you’ll enjoy by implementing telemedicine as part of your regular work schedule.
What about patients?
You’re not the only person who can benefit from access to virtual visits. For your patients, telemedicine negates the need for travel or long wait times in your office and saves them money! Your patients will love the convenience of being able to handle simple medical issues, such as upper respiratory conditions or minor infections, without having to make an appointment to come in and see you.
Telemedicine also prevent unnecessary trips to the ER, which was one of the main reasons I decided to get into the telemedicine business. Your patients have better access to you when they need care. This could mean serving your patients at times that work around their schedule and that help them in an emergency when they need treatment right away—without the ER visit.
Access, convenience, and a time saver—that’s why your patients will love the opportunities telemedicine provides. Your incentives align with theirs, and everyone leaves the virtual appointment happy.
Our Health System
In addition to benefitting you and your patients, telemedicine can alleviate stress on overburdened emergency rooms and urgent care clinics. Your increased availability through telemedicine frees up hospital beds for patients that need them most rather than patients you could see in a few minutes through a virtual appointment.
An emergency room is the most expensive place for care. Cutting down on these unnecessary visits to the ER works in everyone’s favor, including insurance companies and our entire healthcare industry.
Embracing New Technology
Physicians are not always the first adopters of new technology. We’re skeptics. We often resist major changes to our workflow, such as electronic health records. Why is that?
Well besides being incredibly busy and overloaded already, we’re not always involved enough in the creation of these technologies. As a result, technology folks don’t always introduce products and systems that suit our needs and workflow.
If we made our voices heard and expressed our thoughts and concerns, we may be able to create better solutions that really improve care while making our lives easier.
This is why I helped create eVisit—because I truly believe that people who practice medicine can fundamentally impact the system in a better way. Physicians and all providers know that we are in a unique position. Our intricate understanding of practicing medicine is invaluable to creating solutions that improve the world.
So, why does telemedicine make sense for you and your practice? A better question might be, why doesn’t it? With such a long list of benefits, telemedicine could help transform your practice.
