4 Things You Need To Know Before Starting Out A Virtual Clinic

Digital transformation in healthcare can be challenging, unless clinic owners can find the right virtual solution for their practice. After working with some clinics and seeing them stumble during the process, we have come up with these guidelines to help you successfully implement virtual care to your practice workflow. These are 4 things that you must think about before starting your virtual clinic.???

1. Define Goals For Your Virtual Clinic

What makes a successful virtual care solution? Determining what success should look like for your digital practice will vary depending on the overall objectives of your business. The common objectives can include expanding access to care through teleconsult, digitizing your medical practice’s front office, finding a better clinic management software or automating the existing operation. Defining objectives can help you to identify goals and metrics that are most important to your business. A few examples of goals are; enhancing patient engagement and satisfaction, improving clinical workflow, increasing practice effectiveness and so on.?

It should be noted that some goals take time to achieve, so in this case, try to focus more on measuring success with instant metrics to indicate success while waiting for your specific outcomes such as:

• Create new managed channel
• Increase new patient revenue
• Increase retained patient revenue
• Boost patient engagement
• Measure and optimize performance

2. Evaluating Telehealth Vendors

So, you are ready to add telehealth to your practice. How do you choose the right telehealth supplier for your business? While there are many telehealth vendors available on the market, not all virtual care platforms are similar. Choosing a fully integrated and customizable platform is the option you should consider as it can streamline any and all of your practice needs and reduce some financial burden.

Looking for the one that offers you a comprehensive set of end-to-end capabilities to enable remote care delivery and practice management. An ideal virtual care solution should bring significant benefits to all existing areas of your healthcare operation and has met all the requirements of HIPAA.

3. Technology You Need To Get Started

Next, in order to operate a successful virtual care program, it’s also important for clinic owners to identify the basic technical requirements of starting telehealth. What kind of equipment and technical telehealth requirements do your clinic and patients need to have to conduct a successful virtual visit session? Of course, the technical requirement will often vary based on your clinic’s workflow and objectives, but there are a few tips that might help you.

• At a minimum, your practice needs a secure virtual care software to be able to connect to your patients! Some clinics currently offer virtual visits through some free apps like FaceTime or Skype, but be aware that these apps are only designed for simple video chat, with none of the extra support for telemedicine such as session notes, ePrescribe, documentation, billing etc.
• Whatever virtual care platform your practice might be using, your patients will need some basic equipment to start a virtual visit. Make sure your telehealth platform can run smoothly on both computer and mobile device with an integrated or external microphone and camera.

4. Introducing New Telehealth Service - Educate Your Patients

Thanks to the widespread use of telehealth and telemedicine, patients today see virtual care as an acceptable way to see doctors. However, there are still some patients who may not be aware of this remote care model, or maybe they have heard of it but they are unsure about how it works. So, if you are just adopting connected care for your practice, it is important for you to make sure your patients know about every type of care appropriate that you are providing via tele-consult.

Make your customers excited about new possibilities and the benefits to your virtual care service. Actively start conversations with your patients by bringing up virtual appointments at the end of patient visits and consider using a demo version of your platform to show patients how it works.

Looking for more guidance on how to start a virtual clinic? Contact us today or visit our website to schedule a free 30-minute consultation to talk about your goals!