Have a Healthier Medical Practice with Remote Patient Care
In the fast-paced healthcare business setting, it’s vital to stay ahead of the curve. Building a strong online presence, optimizing your SEO, and promoting your business is a must for keeping up with the competition, but have you considered enhancing your post-conversion healthcare services, or improving your offerings as part of your marketing strategy?
Combining a robust online presence with innovative patient care offerings can help you to stand out. Remote patient care is the key to setting your practice apart and enhancing patient care.
What is Remote Patient Care?
Remote patient care involves using digital tools and technology to provide healthcare between in-office visits. It bridges the gap between face-to-face appointments, offering a virtual and remote alternative that gives patients more of you with less of your time.
You’re probably already using telemedicine, but remote patient care tools go far beyond telemedicine, which is technically just another encounter, albeit a virtual one. Either way, encounters require face-to-face time. Remote care tools, on the other hand, help you to:
- Automate interactive patient education and monitoring of progress
- Streamline secure communications with patients and staff
- Track patient progress and data
- Store important patient information without additional labor
Examples of remote patient care tools would be (1) a patient learning management system that allows you to automate the delivery of repetitive care follow-up and instructions or (2) a tracking solution that allows you to track patient’s progress with a program and their biometrics and activity data such as their heartbeat, steps, or calories burned in a given day.
Why Consider Offering Remote Patient Care?
Let’s explore several benefits of incorporating remote patient care into your practice to expand your healthcare offerings and improve patient outcomes:
You Can Reach Patients Where They Are
Remote patient care tools empower patients to access their care information and instructions between office visits using their preferred devices, such as smartphones and personal computers. Offering digital care and education can promote patient compliance and provide top-notch care follow-up without the need for in-person visits. With remote patient care, you can support your patients even when you can’t meet them in person daily.
Empower Patients
Remote patient care empowers patients to participate in their health management actively. Through tracking, tasks, and self-guided tools, patients who take a proactive role in their healthcare often experience improved outcomes. Empowering your patients with these tools can set your practice apart and make it truly unique.
Enhanced Compliance
Effective communication is at the heart of expanding your patient care offerings. Remote patient care tools typically offer secure messaging and telehealth capabilities, ensuring seamless and convenient communication between you and your patients.
This improved interaction contributes to expanding your services while maintaining high care standards.
Additionally, these tools allow you to track your patients’ progress, including biometric data, activity levels, dietary habits, and more, facilitating data-driven decisions for patient care.
Educating Patients
Remote patient care tools provide the means to guide patients through interactive care programs. For instance, if your practice offers a 60-day weight loss program, you can prescribe it digitally using these tools.
Some solutions even allow for the customization of treatment plans and wellness programs, enabling you to tailor your services to your patient population’s specific needs and providing a significant selling point for patients seeking a more personalized healthcare experience.
Beyond the EMR: Remote Patient Care
Most electronic health record (EHR) or electronic medical record (EMR) systems are exactly what their name suggests, a record. However, a record of your past medical history doesn’t provide an action plan. If you’re looking to change patient behaviors and outcomes between encounters so that the next entry in the EMR isn’t the same as the last entry, you need to get patients engaged in change between encounters.
To enable remote patient care through education, monitoring, and lifestyle change, look for a software solution that focuses on promoting practice efficiency and enhancing patient care while also increasing practice revenues.
A good remote patient care solution should be a HIPAA-compliant patient management hub that empowers you to…
- Educate patients daily and automatically between encounters
- Track and store patient data
- Facilitate communication with the patient about progress through that continuum of care
- Help patients make informed decisions about their care
Stop Repeating Yourself
Have you ever found it challenging to educate your patients during an office visit? Or perhaps you’ve given them physical resources for their health goals, only to discover that little has changed by their next visit, and sometimes, their health has even deteriorated?
This is a common occurrence, often due to patients forgetting instructions, losing materials, or simply not knowing where to start.
However, patients always have their phones by their side. With a remote patient education platform and tools, you can guide patients toward better health through automated care and lifestyle instructions, all available through a convenient app.
Look for a solution with patient-friendly tools like
- Daily Education
- Videos
- Interactive Modules
- Tasks and More
This content helps patients understand their conditions, develop healthy habits, and adhere to your specific care instructions in a way that is fun and easy to understand.
Patient Tracking
Once patients receive their educational content, they should be able to complete tasks and track their biometric and activity data. This way, patients have a built-in accountability partner right in their pocket. It’s a full loop of communication: patients receive your care instructions, track their progress, and you get to see their results in real-time.
Patient Management
Make sure your system includes:
- Cloud-based calendar for scheduling and booking by patients.
- Connect easily with staff and patients about patient care.
- Securely store patient intake forms, encounter notes, documents, and more.
- Track supplement orders and lab results.
HIPAA Compliant Communication
In addition to education and tracking, make sure your platform keeps the conversation going with the patient with the following:
- Private messaging with patients and staff
- Practice-wide announcements to many or all patients with bulk messaging
- Individual or group telemedicine appointments
- Patient support groups for patient group discussions about weight loss chronic condition
Enabling some or all of these remote patient care tools in your practice for your benefit and the patient’s benefit will lead to better outcomes, less time in the office for you, and more profitable practice.
This article was written by the team at BodySite, a remote patient education and practice management platform whose mission is empowering healthcare professionals to provide better patient care through digital guidance.
