The need to deliver medical care right to the patients’ houses has always been high and drastically increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nowadays telemedicine software development allows doctors to carry out appointments and examinations right from the smartphone. Find out how telehealth can benefit both patients and clinics.
What is Telemedicine Software?
Telemedicine software is a branch of “health IT” which allows patients and doctors to communicate via video feed, and share text and images. The software may integrate electronic health records of the patient, and provide schedule functionality, and other necessary means to organize effective communication between doctors and patients.
The main components of telehealth software are:
- EHR/PM integration: this ensures that patients’ data is easy to find and update, reducing the amount of manual work
- Client-side app: an easy and familiar way for a patient to interact with the software. Provides easy-to-navigate GUI and useful features, like scheduling, appointment reminders, internal text chat, and integrated customer support.
- HIPAA Compliant Video feed: a video connection must maintain security levels that are enough to provide patient confidentiality required by HIPAA.
Telehealth software must be branded using the clinic’s logo and other brand attributes, like fonts, colors, graphic elements, etc. This will give the patients comfort and trust while using it, and help differentiate them from the competitors.
How Telemedicine Benefits the Patients
The highest benefactors are people with limited mobility who experience difficulties personally attending doctor appointments. Telehealth solutions can help terminally ill, or elderly patients limit actual visits to the doctor to the necessary minimum when the patient’s presence is obligatory. All other communication can be done with video calls.
Eliminating the need to visit the clinic can make the treatment process much more pleasant for the patients. They won’t have to cancel plans and take time off work, fight the traffic, or stand in lines. The appointment can be carried out wherever they like — in the comfort of their home, in their office during lunch break, or when they are abroad.
The efficiency of the treatment will also increase. With a built-in scheduler and reminding notifications, it will be much harder for a client to forget about an appointment, or to miss on follow-up examination.
Benefits for The Clinics
The main reason for a clinic to invest in telehealth software development is that it frees them from the limitations of brick-and-mortar. Moving visits to video feed reduce the number of patience in the waiting areas, thus lowering expenses on administrative stuff. The doctors will be able to carry out more consultations at the same time and work flexible hours, as they won’t be tied to their cabinets.
The amount of last-moment cancelations will drop significantly, as many factors that cause them will vanish. No traffic jams, car problems, or simple unwillingness to go out to see a doctor will intervene.
And last, but not least — customer satisfaction rates will go up. The combined effect of flexibility, convenience, and increased treatment effectiveness (which was discussed earlier), will delight them and they won’t even think about switching the clinic.
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