Saturday, April 30, 2016

Key Steps Of Telemedicine Implementation

By Betty Smith


Hospitals and health facilities are on the verge of implementing telemedicine programs. The program comprises of virtual health coaches, telemedicine health centers and rooms, cloud-based physicians, and highly trained web consultants. With proper planning, right people, modern technology, and effective analysis of workflow, telemedicine implementation becomes an easy task. Both telemedicine and telehealth have ability to increase access to healthcare services, improve their quality, and decrease their cost. Additionally, hospitals can minimize administrative expenses and still manage to maintain an operational excellence.

With proper execution, hospitals are likely to reduce expenditures and improve their operation. Engaging the administrative or executive team can prove to be a difficult task during the implementation of telehealth project. Naturally, some members of executive team may fail to support the project and term it as expensive and invaluable. It is your duty to convince them that the project will be valuable to the hospital. Currently, the physicians are using technology tools to offer care service even though it is not in an official manner. The same case applies to patients, most consults the physicians through phone or video calls.

The telemedicine program will receive positive response and will be embrace by patients since most of them are communicating in a cloud-based style. You must carry out a rigorous market research and identify the potential the market has to offer. Once you have identified the community needs, you should evaluate the healthcare facility and find out if it has the right resource to offer the service that is on demand. Encourage the executive team to participate in matters that affect the community.

After gathering information from the market assessment, conducting a self-assessment is recommendable. You must evaluate the capabilities of your healthcare facilities and find out if you have the right equipment and trained personnel to offer the services that the patients require. For instance, if want to offer pediatric neurology service, you must have enough pediatric neurologist who are interested in telemedicine provision. Identifying the starting point can be a difficult task. Therefore, a committee comprised of stakeholders should be tasked with the duties of carrying out readiness assessment and determining the starting points.

Ensure goals of the telemedicine program are aligning with mission and vision of your hospital. The hospital leader will support the program when they are convinced the hospital stands to benefit if the project is properly implemented. The goals must be clear and realistic.

Allocate enough time for each stage and adhere to the timeline effectively. You should have a clear plan for dealing with emergencies and challenges. Factors that affect proper implementation include the size of healthcare and program goals.

Make sure you have a strong administrative support since you will have the guarantee to access the required resources for implementation. Encourage both the patient and the physician to embrace the technology. Additionally, the administrative team can assist you in dealing with tight timeline.

Telemedicine creates an amazing flexibility since the physicians are able to see the patients. The can give more attention to patients who have major issues, but still address the needs of those with minor ones. Effective implementation is guaranteed when the service provider receive perfect training.




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