After COVID-19 forced the shutters down on nearly every industry, several companies rolled out contingency measures to keep businesses running. New-era technology featured prominently in these roll-outs, given that companies began working with limited manual labour and had to automate quite a few processes.
Telemedicine, which featured in a handful of healthcare providers’ service lists, suddenly shot into the spotlight fuelled by the pandemic’s aftermath. While they were in demand way before COVID-19, the need for remote healthcare without physical contact took off almost overnight.
Telemedicine for Remote Healthcare
COVID-19 has forced the medical community across the world to work twice as hard, with half of their resources. A whole host of procedures and operational processes moved online, heralding a significant industry shift from in-person to virtual care.
The benefits of telemedicine have been noticed by all– patients, doctors, healthcare facilities, and investors. In fact, the telemedicine market is expected to reach a whopping USD 185.6 billion by 2026, thanks to heavy fundings (Fortune Business Insights).
What is Telemedicine: Meaning and Benefits
Telemedicine is also known as telehealth. It refers to the practice of caring for patients remotely, with the help of modern technology, without the doctor or patient being physically present within each other’s vicinity.
Telemedicine involves the distribution of several health-related services, right from care, diagnosis and advice to intervention, remote admissions and patient monitoring. It makes use of regulated and highly secure technology that is equipped with essential features including video conferencing, chat, voice call and file sharing, among others.
The benefits of telemedicine are many. For starters, they provide greater and more equal access to healthcare resources, save time spent on travel, allow doctors to assess a higher number of patients without wasting time, and ease the load of physical visits and checks off of healthcare providers. Patient-doctor chats offer peace of mind and convenient access to professional help without risking going to the hospital and taxing already overwhelmed resources.
The Role of Chat Features in Telemedicine
Telemedicine is heavily reliant on a good user interface and engaging features. The first and foremost considering in such an application is trust, but the ease of use and little to no delays are just as important when creating a chat that serves the purpose it is designed for. A HIPAA compliant chat solution packs all of these necessities.
Aside from swift typing and responses, there are other nice-to-have features that make the experience of a white label telemedicine platform that much more comfortable. Presence indicators, for example, tell patients that their doctor is live and ready to help them. Typing indicators also create a feeling of immediate attention, neatly replicating the verbal and non-verbal cues that are present in physical conversations. Read receipts make the patient feel heard while emoji reactions go so far as to mimic real-life facial expressions to ease conversations.
The Importance of Regulatory Compliance
Regulatory compliance is vital to creating a telemedicine platform that upholds the values of healthcare, even if not in a traditional setting. Unlike other casual chat apps, the best telemedicine platform is one that is fully compliant with standard international and local regulations. More often than not, these relate to patient safety, security and confidentiality, whether of the doctor-patient messages, files or diagnoses.
To this end, HIPAA compliant chat options are increasingly being adopted and used across providers, whether in the form of plugins or APIs. These ensure that the healthcare provider gets their platform up and running in the shortest time, without forgoing regulatory compliance and risking doctor-patient confidentiality.
Ensuring Scalable Applications with Hosted Services
Apps that work on a smaller level often fail miserably when they’re scaled up. However, healthcare providers can’t afford to have this happen, especially in times like these when healthcare is the need of the hour and downtime is risky. Therefore, hosted services are essential to ensuring that your choice of HIPAA compliant telehealth platform is stable and reliable even when it experiences a surge of users to the tune of thousands.
Hosted services ensure the essential architecture of the tool is flawless and easy to scale. As more and more users take to the platform, the providers can ensure the framework is steady and can also add more features to enhance usability. Additionally, providers can conduct any background maintenance they may need to without long hours of downtime.
Real-time Alerts to Match Pace with Changes
A HIPAA-compliant telemedicine tool can go a long way in ensuring clarity and certainty even in times of confusion. Real-time alerts play a keen role here, as they provide crisp and non-sensationalised information that keeps patients alert and in the know.
This is especially true of the COVID-19 pandemic, as so much changes on the daily including testing centres, lockdown regulations, case numbers, symptoms and more. Real-time alerts with information from international organisations including the WHO and the CDC can ensure that patients are kept up to date without triggering anxiety or panic.
Telemedicine is the Need of the Hour
The healthcare industry is facing its biggest crisis yet, and the time is ripe for transforming age-old processes that can’t keep up in an ever-changing world. Telemedicine moves lower-intensity processes to apps and providers online, leaving physical locations such as clinics and hospitals free for emergencies, surgeries and other lifesaving tasks.
Telemedicine is a critical tool in the fight against COVID-19, indeed in the longer pushback against circumstances that overwhelm healthcare providers and tax resources alarmingly.
