2. Make patients active care team members
For any telehealth interaction, the follow-up component is key, and many telehealth programs provide tremendous value through automated or prompted follow-ups that help determine if patients are getting better or receiving the next steps of appropriate care.
But it doesn’t end there. For telehealth to truly integrate with a patient’s care plan, organizations need to provide educational materials to reference after the appointment that are consistent with the clinical evidence virtual care clinicians are using and the messages being delivered to patients from in-person providers.
A 2022 online survey indicated nearly half of patients didn’t get all their questions answered by their provider and 80% had follow-up questions. Telehealth organizations could partner with patient engagement providers to fill this gap with health information and help patients better understand their own health journey. This helps keep the patient at the center of their own care and decision-making process while also reducing fragmentation by maintaining consistency across all the health information they are receiving.
3. Promoting interoperability
Considering how telehealth services fit into interoperability and information-sharing processes can help organizations improve compliance, reduce duplicity of testing, and generally streamline provider workflow.
Because many telehealth technologies haven’t historically been compatible with major EHRs, it has meant that oftentimes clinical notes, prescriptions, and other important patient information hasn’t synced between virtual care providers and in-person healthcare organizations. Filling in these gaps manually leads to duplicate processes and extra work, which in turn heightens the risk of errors and healthcare worker burnout.
In 2019, the American Telehealth Association launched an interoperability initiative to encourage providers, solution developers, and payers to work together to address some of these technical gaps and establish telehealth software standards, shared data practices, and governance.
Some advanced clinical decision support resources, like clinical pathways and lab interpretation tools, can assist telehealth providers in remaining consistent to protocols while they work to connect directly to health system EHRs. When EHRs aren’t customized to telehealth, the built-in or integrated decision support tools an onsite clinician can access within the EHR might not be accessible from the telehealth documentation system. Having aligned resources across channels can help bridge some of the interoperability gaps to promote consistency in patient care protocols.
Advocating for standards and a systems-based approach to telehealth
As the telehealth industry continues to develop and find its permanent place in the healthcare ecosystem, the formation of industry groups that see telehealth vendors and organizations working together is an important next step toward fighting fragmentation. When industry colleagues and competitors can understand that they're all trying to solve the same problems and understand all the different places where people could be receiving care and working together to make sure that care is consistent, we can deliver virtual care with less variability, ultimately saving the healthcare ecosystem money and improving outcomes.
To learn more about how systems focused on evidence can better support telehealth and omnichannel care, download the Wolters Kluwer Health Point-of-care Report: Applying systems thinking to clinical information.
