1. Aligning protocols and evidence-based care
Regardless of setting, patients today expect a standard of evidence-based care and quality from their providers. By aligning telehealth clinical resources with the same evidence in-person providers are using, telehealth organizations can create a consistent experience and align decision-making with other outlets from which patients are receiving care.
Equipping telehealth teams with clinical decision support tools within the virtual care workflow allows them to do their jobs effectively and efficiently, connecting to evidence-based guidance and decision-making clarity when they need it without disrupting their patient interactions. When those resources are consistent with health systems and aligned to care protocols and best practices, it helps providers standardize and improve outcomes across all channels of interaction.
For a telehealth organization, using evidence-based decision support solutions to establish clinical protocols can be an essential step toward achieving better care alignment and overall outcomes. With a variety of different types of providers, including independent contractors, often engaged in telehealth, it can sometimes result in many individualized approaches to practice underneath a single organizational umbrella. Telehealth organizations that provide robust protocols based in evidence can really shine in terms of reducing fragmentation through more aligned practices, reducing the potential for clinical variability and operational complications, helping lower costs related to those complications, and improving patient outcomes.
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.
