Multiple Point Products for Virtual Care is Problematic
Many healthcare systems are solving consumer virtual care demands by implementing a variety of telemedicine point solutions across different departments and service lines. This is often the case when virtual care programs in your hospital have grown organically as individual projects. They are generally not supported or governed by a centralized telehealth team. This common approach almost always leads to inconsistent user experiences, workflow fragmentation, and data reporting issues.
Inconsistent Patient & Provider Experience
When you have different virtual care products running across your hospital it makes it impossible to create a consistent user experience for providers and patients alike. Different registration requirements, logins, integrations, and the like, set everyone up for extra work and frustration. And extra work and frustration never bodes well for adoption because who wants to use a product that requires more work and increases anxiety?
Fragmented Workflows
You need a virtual care platform that accommodates your workflows⏤not the other way around. When you have to create workarounds, include extra steps or even add repetition in an already-established workflow, it becomes fragmented and inefficient. In healthcare time is not only money, it is often a question of life and death.
Limited Data Reporting
You need good data to make good decisions. When you are working with multiple virtual care platforms you open yourself up to inconsistent data, and difficult-to-synthesize analytics. You have to pull data from many databases, using different methods, and you’ll likely even get them in different formats. Then, after that’s done you have to manually compile all that data into something useful. This is time and labor intensive, and it limits your enterprise visibility and optimization capabilities. According to research, organizations taking an enterprise approach to virtual care are 30% more likely to be highly successful than organizations with a departmental, point product approach.
Help! I’m Using Multiple Virtual Care Point Products!
If this is where your organization is at, don’t worry. You will be able to consolidate your multi-point solutions. Limiting obstacles makes your consolidation efforts less painful. Start by ask questions like:
- Will the vendor be able to accommodate our unique workflows and integrations?
- Does the vendor provide unlimited tech support for our providers and patients?
- Will we be able to scale appropriately in the future with this solution?
Banner Health is a good example of an organization that identified the need to consolidate multiple virtual care products into one standard platform across their hospitals. They selected eVisit to enable ambulatory virtual care for their patients throughout the Southwest. The eVisit platform will power Banner’s virtual urgent care, virtual primary care, and virtual specialty care.
Pro Tip: Break your virtual care strategy into phases with one service line launching at a time. Launching each service line separately gives your virtual care efforts a strong foundation and promotes success. You gain invaluable experience in implementation, integration, training, and adoption that you can carry forward with each subsequent launch.
Three service lines to consider
Your organization has unique challenges you want to solve with virtual care. Here are three use-cases proven to be solid places to start, and may help you identify areas you can consolidate first.
1. Virtual Primary and Urgent Care
Today’s patients are savvy consumers preferring the convenience of healthcare access anytime, anywhere, on their mobile devices. You can expand your reach into the community, acquire new patients, lower patient leakage, and increase your revenue all without breaking new ground⏤which can be expensive, to say the least. The building of one new clinic can cost upwards of $1M, which does not include the cost of staffing, maintenance, and all the other overhead that goes along with it. Increase new and retained patient revenue with direct to consumer virtual care.
2. Virtual Discharge Management
If one of your recently discharged patients shows up in the ER or urgent care clinic for post-discharge issues, there is a significantly increased risk they will be readmitted to inpatient care. On average, about 15% of your discharged patients are readmitted and the average cost you incur for each readmitted patient is $14,400. Virtual care is one of the most effective approaches to proactively manage your newly discharged patients to reduce readmission rates.
3. Employee Virtual Care
You’re always looking for better, less costly ways to provide quality healthcare to your employees. With the average cost of employer provided healthcare hovering around $14,000/employee, your options often boil down to reducing the overall benefit, or compromising for a plan with less benefits in order to stay in budget. However, you’re in a unique position. You can leverage your staff of providers to deliver healthcare to the rest of your employees. If you provide a convenient option for healthcare, your employees are more likely to use it.
The eVisit Enterprise Virtual Care platform
eVisit is the only enterprise virtual care platform enabling organizations like yours to manage patient care using your own providers, across your organization with a single solution, regardless of specialty. With eVisit you get:
- The ability to accommodate your unique workflows, regardless of complexity, because of its more than 150 points of configuration.
- Integration with more than 50 EMRs through HL7 standards.
- The safest data protection because of its double-encrypted, data vault.
- Native HD quality enterprise-grade video that works within your stringent firewalls and security policies because there is nothing else for you to download.
- An in-house Customer Success team to help you with your journey from on-boarding and beyond.
- A partner, not a healthcare provider competing for your patients.
- unlimited technical support for everyone—from your administrators, providers, and patients.
Want to learn more? Download our Definitive Guide to Purchasing a Telemedicine Platform!
