Benefits of Telehealth for Primary Care
As a primary care provider, you’re always looking for ways to expand your practice’s offerings and make getting the care your patients need more convenient. With telemedicine for primary care providers, you can consult with your patients from any location, making it possible to provide “house calls” without ever setting foot in a patient’s home. Telehealth is becoming more widely available, and offering your services via telemedicine is just another way that you can provide the very best care to your patient base.
Expanding your practice’s success means staying up to date with evolving trends, and telemedicine for primary care providers lets you do just that. With easy-to-use telehealth tools in place, you can see your primary care patients in much the same way as you would if they were in your office – all without inconveniencing them with the commute and the wait. PrimaHealth provides tools and software that put telemedicine at your patients’ fingertips, so you can expand the options you offer while simultaneously enhancing practice management and patient flow-through.
Telehealth can provide access to healthcare professionals that would otherwise not have been possible, and make more efficient use of healthcare provider resources, while still remaining compliant with patient privacy issues related to mental health services delivery. For providers and patients alike, in addition to the positive health effects, there are numerous benefits to using telemedicine for mental health conditions:
Provide Ongoing Care
For patients suffering from chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease, Telehealth helps patients better engage in their care. Primary Care Providers are able to monitor symptom progression, adjust medications, and modify treatment plans without asking patient to return to the office.
Offer Counseling Services
Primary Care Providers dedicate a lot of time and energy to mapping out self-care plans for managing depression, weight loss, and smoking cessation. Telemedicine allows physicians to conveniently check in with patients, provide counseling, and ensure treatment plans are still working well.
Review Screenings And Lab Results
Providers order multiple lab tests and screenings each day, whether it be Complete Blood Counts, blood glucose levels, or other tests. For abnormal lab results, remote video allows Primary Care Providers to discuss results with their patients face-to-face without losing money on follow-up phone calls.
Manage Medications
Whether it’s birth control, blood pressure medication, or antidepressants, remote video appointments are an ideal solution for adjusting patient medications. It’s more efficient for both patients and providers without sacrificing physician reimbursement.
Chronic Condition Management
Chronic condition patients often require multiple physician office visits each year. These are patients who have regimented treatment plans that are frequently adjusted and must be closely monitored by an existing provider. For patients with chronic conditions, video-based follow-up appointments often involve medication adjustments, monitoring of side effects, lab/imaging result reviews, and overall treatment plan management.
Chronic conditions commonly managed through telemedicine include:
- Diabetes
- Hypertension
- Coronary artery disease
- Cardiac arrhythmia
- End stage renal disease
- Hepatitis
- Asthma / Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
- Obesity
- Oncologic co-morbidities
- Neurodegenerative diseases
Wellness exam follow-up
Patients who receive yearly wellness exams are prime candidates for telemedicine follow-ups. While the wellness exam itself requires a head-to-toe physical exam, following up on blood work and other screenings is ideal for a remote telemedicine visit. These remote visits also give providers the opportunity to discuss how the patient can make smart lifestyle decisions in order to improve overall health – which is especially important when abnormal results are found.
Common wellness screenings ideal for telemedicine follow-up include:
- Colonoscopy / sigmoidoscopy results
- Mammogram results
- Cholesterol levels
- Sexually Transmitted Disease testing
- Complete Blood Count results
- Blood glucose levels
- Liver function testing
- Pap smear results
- Blood electrolytes
Minor urgent care
Patients with a broad range of minor urgent care issues are increasingly turning to telemedicine for convenient access to healthcare providers from home. PrimaHealth enables these patients to receive care from their existing providers, ensuring full access to their medical records and providing continuity that is not possible with urgent care centers and on-demand telehealth services.
Common urgent care issues evaluated over telemedicine include:
- Cold and flu
- Allergies
- Sinus/ear infections
- Sore throat
- Urinary Tract Infections
- Diarrhea and vomiting
Improved Patient Care
Convenience
Virtual visits make mental health services more convenient for patients. With telemedicine, a patient seeking behavioral health support can get treatment without leaving home – avoiding the perceived social stigma. Greater convenience also leads to more routine treatment and better outcomes.
Increased Access
For patients who live in remote areas or congested urban areas, who are housebound, who have trouble lining up childcare, or just have too much going on in their lives to make room for regular therapy sessions, telemedicine offers an easier connection to mental healthcare.
Continuity of Care
With the ease of scheduling and attending appointments from home, more routine appointments can be scheduled as needed with preferred caregivers. Fewer missed appointments mean that patients are more likely to achieve the goals of their treatment program through greater adherence to evidence-based treatment.
Enhanced Productivity
Operational Efficiencies
The use of virtual visits can allow a provider organization to leverage various levels of clinicians to engage the patient to address different needs. The convenience of an online appointment can allow a patient to secure both therapy and medication management from the convenience of their home.
Clinic Throughput
Virtual visits, whether scheduled for the patient or by themselves, can eliminate the inconvenience of travel to see a provider, missed appointments and/or patients simply not seeking care. In this way, online visits can ensure clinicians have highly productive days.
Support Clients Between Scheduled Visits
Just like other areas of medicine, patients with mental health disorders can have acute episodes needing timely intervention. Telemedicine can enhance supportive care by providing greater access to the appropriate clinicians.
Extend Service Reach
Providers who offer services virtually can expand their reach to new clients beyond their local area, or secure specialty services to better meet a patient’s needs.
Timely Assessment
When patients visit the ED with a mental health complaint, timely evaluation is important. With prompt assessment, patient management burdens are reduced, and treatment decisions can be made more rapidly.
The PrimaHealth Primary Care Telehealth Solution
PrimaHealth’s Telehealth Virtual Care platform offers mental health professionals a complete virtual clinic to easily launch online services. Our industry-leading digital exam room provides all the tools 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 Telehealth software platform allows healthcare providers to deliver convenient and timely care to their patients with mental health conditions wherever and whenever they need it – just as if they were in the clinic exam room.
Key features of the PrimaHealth Telehealth platform for primary care include:
Powerful rules engine for intelligent workflow, with customized rules that can control patient registration and ensure patients are routed to the appropriate provider (e.g. psychiatrist, psychologist, social worker) who is licensed to comply with treatment needs and meet jurisdiction requirements.
Enterprise-level dynamic scheduling system, enabling 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 digital 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.
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 extract to meet audit requirements.
Virtual visits can be an ideal complement to traditional care or can provide access to care for many patients currently not treated. PrimaHealth’s Telehealth platform can support a variety of service lines across a multi-specialty care group, and bring a new level of convenience to patients, increasing the likelihood of treatment plan success.
