Benefits of Telehealth for Oncology
Since many cancer patients are fragile, immuno-compromised, and often beset by side effects, the greater and more convenient access to services afforded by telemedicine helps to ensure that they are regularly seen, receive care in a timely manner, and stay on their treatment protocol. Telehealth mitigates the oncologist shortage problem by allowing more patients to be cared for by the same provider. By increasing the efficiency of each provider, practices can increase their profitability while providing care to a larger number of patients.
Offering virtual visits provided by oncologists and other care extenders allows hospitals and health systems to meet patients’ needs instead of transferring them to another location or losing them to alternate providers. Telehealth also offers a means by which oncologists can consult remotely with specialists in other disciplines in other locations to assist in their assessments and diagnoses or expand the services required for a specific patient. For patients undergoing active cancer treatment, telehealth expands their access to quality care, enables timely management of treatment side effects, and can improve quality of life by eliminating the inconvenience and cost of travel.
The key benefits of using telemedicine for oncology include:
Greater Access to Care
Access to Qualified Care
For cancer patients who live in remote areas, are fragile, or have trouble traveling, telehealth enables them to access care from skilled oncologists and other providers without requiring an in-person visit.
Convenience
Virtual visits make care more convenient for cancer patients. With telehealth, a patient seeking care can get treatment from their providers or receive adjunct treatments such as mental health services in the privacy of their home.
Treatment Adherence
With the ease of scheduling and attending virtual visits from home, care teams can stay in more routine contact with patients to proactively manage their care. Greater convenience can mean fewer missed appointments or more timely interventions to enhance the patient experience, potentially leading to better outcomes.
Side Effects Management
Virtual visits make it easier for patients to report side effects, or for care teams to engage patients to ensure they are comfortable and to proactively address needs that may arise, such as early management of side effects. In addition to side effects, the mental anguish facing patients can be a challenge to the desired outcome. Virtual visits make it easy to deliver adjunct services such as mental health or nutrition counseling directly to the patient at home.
Improved Clinical Outcomes and Quality of Life
Patients benefit from their caregivers’ active management of their condition, which meets more of their medical needs and keeps them comfortable and confident in their treatment, leading to higher quality of life, and — by staying on protocol — improving potential outcomes. Engaging in virtual visits can reduce the time to acquire second opinions or specialty consults when needed, accelerating treatment decisions and administration of therapy.
Enhanced Efficiency
Improved Patient Flow
Introducing virtual visits can reduce travel delays, no-shows, and ensures patient contact when needed, enabling providers to gain operational efficiencies. Clinic traffic can be optimized for patients requiring in-person care, so that practitioners can serve more patients and provide more frequent follow-ups encounters via virtual care for those who need it most.
Easier Collaboration
Telemedicine makes it easy for caregivers to interact directly with other specialists or enhance services patients require that may not need an office visit. Pharmacy consultations and dietary and mental health services can easily be delivered remotely, providing complete patient support.
The PrimaHealth Oncology Solution
PrimaHealth’s Telehealth platform offers oncologists a complete virtual clinic to easily launch online services, enabling services during the diagnostic, active treatment, and follow-up phases of care. Our industry-leading digital exam room provides all the tools needed to engage patients in one click and document the encounter. With advanced capabilities such as multi-party visits, high-resolution screen sharing, and file transfer, the PrimaHealth Telehealth software platform allows healthcare providers to deliver convenient and timely care to their cancer patients wherever and whenever they need it – just as if they were in the clinic exam room.
Key features of the PrimaHealth Telehealth platform for oncology include:
Powerful rules engine for intelligent workflow, with customized rules that can control patient registration, ensure patients are routed to the appropriate provider.
Enterprise-level dynamic scheduling systems enable appointment scheduling by providers, administrative staff, or directly by patients themselves; true on-demand encounters can be facilitated via a unified patient queue vs. the antiquated, one-dimensional, booking-based approach used by others.
High-definition video for virtual exams that can support multi-participant and/or clinician-to-clinician sessions, enabling timely care and decision-making. This high-quality video experience can also improve intimacy with the patient to enhance the clinical encounter.
Screen sharing enables clinicians to present x-rays, CT scans, and MRI images from PACS systems, diagnostic reports, and education materials in real-time to patients or other health care providers as part of a live encounter.
Market-leading compliance adherence and security layers, including HIPAA, HITECH, GDPR and COPPA-compliant software, combined with complete logging of all transactions, with data available for extraction to meet audit requirements.
Robust set of API and SDK libraries to provide integration with third-party systems or development of complementary applications.
