Integrated Solutions Are Integral to the Future of Telehealth

1. Integrated Solutions Are Integral to the Future of Telehealth American healthcare is extremely complex with many layers of regulation and bureaucracy. From the time a person walks in for a consultation, to the moment when the doctor gets paid for his services, there is an elaborate series of steps that need to be carried out for everything to work out smoothly. Managing appointments, verifying insurance coverage, documenting the visit, medical coding, and submitting a claim to a payer are the steps of processes that transpire between a scheduled appointment and a doctor getting paid for his services. Needless to say, it is a very long, time- consuming, and laborious process that is also prone to errors. But digitization has alleviated much of the problems that haunt these procedures. Thanks to innovations in healthcare technologies, there are digital solutions from multiple companies for each of the processes mentioned above. However, all of them need to work together seamlessly in order for providers to derive value for their investment in the solutions. That is where integration can play a big role. Integrated healthcare solutions feature one or more of the medical solutions working together at a provider organization. For example, a provider who uses an EHR would also have an appointment scheduling solution, in addition to a medical coding and billing solution integrated with the EHR. The benefit of this is that the staff can manage the appointments, pull up medical records, carry out medical coding, and billing activities from a single consolidated digital interface. Such an integrated medical platform allows doctors as well as medical staff to increase the productivity and efficiency of their workflows and serve their patients better. In an era of increasing digital adoption, having integrated health care solutions has become extremely important in terms of improving the quality of the overall patient experience. When talking about digital adoption in healthcare, it’s impossible not to mention telehealth. As the name suggests, telehealth involves providing medical services remotely using digital and telecommunication technology. As more people move over to using telehealth applications, having an integrated health system is really becoming a question of necessity, rather than a novelty. When a provider is seeing a patient virtually, he or she must be able to pull up the patient’s medical history during the consultation, view tests results, scans, and previous prescriptions using the telemedicine platform. Being able to do so saves time, makes the consultation hassle-free, and lets the doctor devote greater time and energy to the patient. In addition to making it easy for doctors during virtual consultations, integrated medical IT solutions also help providers cut back on overhead. Since the doctor would be able to access medical records, view test results, and scans with a few clicks, there’s little need to hire additional staff for support. As a result, the doctor would also be able to see more patients, reduce overhead, and also improve the quality of care. In other words, broadly integrated healthcare providers’ solutions are a win-win for both doctors and patients. As the healthcare industry increasingly adopts digitization, it is becoming more and more important for integrated health systems to be able to do help clinical staff carry out more activities. Fragmented systems might help individual workflows speed up, but integrated solutions maximize the overall productivity of healthcare operations.