Three Areas Where Your Telehealth Program Will Perform Better With a Telehealth Resource Program (TRP)

There are a lot of things to consider when evaluating your telehealth program. Do you know how well your telehealth program is running or even how to measure it? What about license usage, how well equipment works, or how to future proof your program? These factors can significantly affect patient and provider satisfaction as well as quality of care.

For most IT directors, their telehealth program can be a complete mystery and cause frustration, especially when they want to expand their program or add new healthcare offerings. Without comprehensive data across all areas, it slows the entire organization down and creates challenges for decision-makers regarding growth or updates.

You need complete, high-quality data when asking the question: “What value does this bring?”

Many healthcare systems have tried to solve these issues by hiring more people or trying to add workarounds. To truly solve the root causes and still be scalable, you need a better system. Let’s dive into how each of these frustrating pain points can easily be fixed

1) Disparate Data

During a panelist session at the Smart VAR Healthcare Summit, John Daniels, VP of Strategic Relations for HIMSS, discusses frustrations in healthcare IT. “We need to take all the disparate systems and get them to communicate with each other to get the full picture,” he says. “We need to pull data into a single warehouse or repository where the organization can use the data and can do analysis.”

If you’re like most healthcare systems, this is probably a scenario that sounds familiar. Video conference apps, EMRs, billing systems, even digital peripherals – the list of disparate systems can go on. And because of all these siloed systems, many telehealth and IT directors are losing too much time gathering data from multiple sources to get any valuable insights.

Using the Telehealth Resource Program (TRP) platform, powered by Ignis Health, is an agnostic healthcare data analytics solution that integrates with various systems to give you a complete view of all information and data. TRP makes downloading reports that used to take a whole day to put together available at the click of a single button. The platform ties into each system, giving you reports and data all in one place.

2) Bad Data

If you want all your systems to run smoothly, scale your telehealth offerings, or find out if you’re losing money on unused areas, you need accurate data. Most video conferencing platforms try to show some data, but it’s not quite enough to be very useful. You may get bits and pieces, but you can’t rely on inaccurate data when it comes to making financial decisions.

That’s where a fully transparent TRP solution can help fill in the gaps. It provides more than just usage; it shows if a specific IP address or VPN may be causing dropped calls. You can set up notifications and alerts when connectivity issues arise to fix them quickly instead of trying to use a timely process of elimination.

3) Limited Data

Additional comments from the panelists at the Smart VAR Healthcare Summit discuss that hospitals, especially large systems with many facilities, need to think about future-proofing to grow and adapt as technologies change. If you are limiting your data to whatever – if any – is provided to you by a device or platform, you aren’t able to see the complete picture.

Having a system that can track your current telehealth technologies and expand to include any future technologies means your program won’t need a complete overhaul with each addition. The TRP platform is built around being completely technology agnostic so that wherever the future of your telehealth practice goes, you can still collect valuable data.

Getting the Most From Your Data

Partnering with knowledgeable vendors to develop solutions is one of the most significant ways for a healthcare IT department to succeed. Derek Novak, President of MercyOne PHSO, notes that many healthcare providers are exploring more data agnostic approaches. He writes that healthcare systems are partnering with vendors to solve disparate data problems in Healthcare Tech Outlook magazine. “These partnerships are delivering increased insights to health systems operational opportunities to drive things like member loyalty, as well as  opportunities to drive down the total cost of care.”

If you are ready to partner with a technology-agnostic vendor, let IDS help you throughout the process.