Enhancing the Telehealth Experience
By Walter Hopgood, Senior Consultant, Application Services
With COVID-19 impacting patient care delivery for more than a year, and an overwhelming majority of patients not yet been vaccinated, your ambulatory providers have likely fully embraced telehealth. What began as an option to bring primary and specialty care to remote areas where care may be scarce, it has grown into a tool we now use every day.
But how was your rollout? And is your site doing everything it can to make telehealth easier for providers and beneficial to patients?
If you can’t answer that question immediately, then your answer is most likely a resounding ‘no.’
There are ways that you can embrace telehealth and make it easier for all parties involved to do what they need in a streamlined fashion. And while telehealth has been deemed impersonal by some1, giving providers the ability to focus on the patient and not the technology behind the appointment helps everyone involved.
There are multiple ways of optimizing your existing telehealth offerings that can benefit everyone involved. A few of them are:
- Registration: When it comes to patient registration, telehealth is its own animal. As such, you should have at least two conversations to register patients — a standard registration that captures the items you need to know when booking a telehealth appointment and a conversation for a “Quick Reg” to be performed on the fly, with the absolute minimum of fields.
- Cerner Millennium® Core: Establish locations for upcoming and past telehealth patients to be registered and filter out non-telehealth registration conversations.
- Documentation: The same templates you use to document in-person patient visits may work for telehealth visits, but may contain items the telehealth provider doesn’t need. Why not create new templates that allow quick, streamlined documentation for providers, who are juggling more during this time?
- Quick Orders: Patients completing a telehealth visit may need new prescriptions or laboratory tests or other procedures ordered. A custom telehealth MPage with the most common orders and details prefilled means less time ordering and more time focusing on the patient’s needs.
These are just a handful of items that can help your organization embrace telehealth more fully and more importantly, make it easier for your providers and create a better experience for your patients.
At HPG, our expertise goes far beyond EHR implementation. By connecting as a partner for our clients and working as an extension of their team, we provide the highest levels of support, agility and strategic guidance available. Our expert consultants are ready to assist with similar projects in the future.
