Category: Telemedicine

If you think telemedicine was just a short term solution for COVID summer, you are wrong.

Telemedicine is here to stay. Arizton’s recent research projects “The US telehealth market is expected to reach to around $10 billion by 2020 with high double-digit YoY growth of around 80%, due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic.”

We manage telehealth service offerings as a whole for a few healthcare customers. This includes marketing telehealth services, providing telemedicine technology solution if they do not want to use the one their EMR provides and billing for telemedicine services.

You can build an entire (and quite profitable, I might add) line of service for telemedicine. Read the following guides to help you navigate the path.

1. Start with a quick guide to telemedicine. Not that you have been living under a rock, but this will walk you through the modalities to understand – video calls, Virtual check in calls, Telephone-Only E/M, eVisits, Remote patient monitoring.
2. Read the COVID-19 updates on telemedicine. There are numerous restrictions around Medicaid reimbursement, private payer law and professional regulation/health & safety laws (statewide and national).
3. Is it all fun and games? Not really – Read the Pros and cons of telemedicine. While this is not an exhaustive list for pros and cons of telemedicine, it is good to be aware of some of these before you get started. If you truly think through these, they can help you decide if telemedicine is right for your practice or not.
4. Should you offer telemedicine services? Even during COVID, we noticed that many practices are not offering telemedicine services. Our position has remained that it is unacceptable to not offer telemedicine services to your patients. Before COVID, there were confusions around reimbursements and hence most patient access strategies did not include telemedicine services. However, with CMS opening up the floodgates around telemedicine during COVID, there’s simply no reason not to see patients through telemedicine.
5. Use this as a guide on “How to deploy a telehealth strategy for your practice”. Depending on your organization’s maturity and preparedness in addition to availability of providers, you can offer some or all of the following telehealth services. You need to consider (1) Services you are going to offer via telehealth (2) Telehealth technology platform of choice (3) Reimbursement for services rendered (4) Clinical workflow (re)configurations
6. Telemedicine technology helps you provide better patient care. Telemedicine also helps you lower no-shows, retain patients. Finally, telemedicine service offering also helps to generate additional reimbursement dollars. Read this as a guide for Telemedicine Technology needed for offering telehealth. The technologies you need would depend on the telehealth services you plan to launch and the type of care you intend to provide. As of now, you can use publicly available audio/video and store/forward technologies to tend to these unusual circumstances. Noted exceptions are public facing audio/video platforms like Facebook live, Twitch etc.
7. How about billing? Read this one Billing for telemedicine services. It’s important to understand the documentation requirements for telehealth, evisit, telephone only E/M etc billing to avoid denials in the future. Make sure you and your staff understand documentation requirements well and instruct your providers accordingly.
8. Once you have decided that telemedicine line of service is for you, you need to market it just like any other service offering. Read this guide “How to market telehealth services“
9. There are a few gotchas you need to understand well. Read this on “How to schedule and get paid for telemedicine“. There are some major differences between a televisit appointment and an appointment in office. Here are some tips on how to schedule telemedicine appointments and how to collect copays from patients (if any).
10. Online digital E/M is yet another way that you can extend care to patients beyond traditional office visits. As we have always mentioned, ensuring the highest patient access leads to higher patient satisfaction, thereby leading to higher patient reviews and ultimately, contributes to increased patient volumes. Read this guide to understand online / digital E/M better.
11. Read the success stories of a few practices that we have worked with. Learn how they leveraged telemedicine for further growth. Here’s “How an occupational therapy practice uses telehealth“. Here’s how an ophthalmology group practice took advantage of the latest technical advancements for teleretinal screenings. Yet another example of skilled nursing facilities taking advantage of telemedicine.