Growth Strategies For A Telehealth Platform

The demand for telemedicine apps has reached an all-time high in the wake of the pandemic. Technologies such as telemedicine, chatbots, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality are being deployed to help gather information, reassure the population, treat patients, make diagnoses and even prepare reports.

Telemedicine apps are becoming an important part of the healthcare infrastructure and various organizations, hospitals, clinics, doctors, individuals, and entrepreneurs are addressing the use of telehealth platforms catering for patients.

The pandemic has also played a major role and acted as a push for telemedicine and has opened a door of opportunity for healthcare entrepreneurs. We can see a steep rise in the telehealth app launches in 2020.

Developing and launching a telehealth platform is just one phase for healthcare entrepreneurs, but to thrive in the highly competitive market takes a whole lot of effort. Patients have various choices as there are thousands of apps available, but only the right ones make their impact in the healthcare industry.

I consider Telehealth to be a low-frequency marketplace where the user may use the platform once a month or less. This means a telehealth entrepreneur will have to double the efforts on retention – both on the supply and the demand side. Founders are required to focus on making significant value into the telehealth platform, beyond discovery & matching.

Having Low-frequency usage means a telehealth platform has to focus on competition and acquiring users with effective marketing. Here are some ideas for telehealth founders and healthcare entrepreneurs that can help them on their journey-

1. Focus On Your Differentiator

Think of unique features that would be useful for your audience. Find what are the aspects where the satisfaction score is still low with competitors.

Mark out those areas- whether it is the availability of practitioners or the quality of the video stream. Interview your potential users and find out the latent needs that you can fulfill.

You can also look into competing with the offline experience rather than with the online experience.

Integrating with health data or proactive nudges for the user based on data can also become a competitive edge.

2. Integrate With Things That Make Life Easy For Users

Practitioners are busy. Your platform should be easy to work with and should decrease the work for practitioners. Think of integrations with platforms like EPIC as well as automation in different areas that eventually make time-saving one of the advantages of your platform.

This way, you can incentivize supply that leads to demand. When a practitioner asks their patient to use a particular platform, they would oblige.

Similarly, for users, create space for keeping reminders, health documents, insurance, prescriptions, etc., that the user can use while still deciding whether to use the platform further or not.

Additionally, health device integration and concierge integration can make the user experience smoother and provide a full care continuum.

3. Think Of Growth Hacks That Will Lead You To More Practitioners Quickly

For a telehealth platform, the supply side will have to grow first. Hence, work aggressively on onboarding practitioners quickly. Come up with ideas to keep practitioners engaged and motivated to remain on the platform. Have value adds such as other features they can use while they wait for patients to come.

These could again be features related to building their profile, transcription, appointment setting, reviews, etc.

Keep the platform released in limited geography and seed the platform.

Another way to increase supply quickly would be to join hands and collaborate with such platforms that are serving doctors for some other reason but not a direct competitor.

Practo, a telehealth platform, created the Practo Pro app separately for the doctors that would focus totally on doctors’ self needs such as managing schedules, track feedback, online consultations, etc.

4. Innovate

Innovation is one area in which you can create an edge. Going back to understanding the patient’s cycle, you should think about future trends and things that are still missing. Of course, it would not be so obvious, but a diligent effort to keep pushing the envelope can help.

Since, for a marketplace, you need reasons for the supply and demand to stay on your platform while you work on making transactions happen, innovation can give you a long rope on user experience.

You can think of blending new technology with old concepts or vice versa.

Imagine combining fitness-based data automatically prompting for scheduling visits or disrupting the postoperative course for the patient.

Another area could be using cloud computing and data to reinforce better care plans.

In fact, Mindbowser worked with a team of practitioners to build a platform based on thousands of data points, and artificial intelligence guides the intervention decision-making and recovery process.

5. Make It Available In Low Latency/even Offline Mode

You need to make your content available for the patients over a wide array of channels to ensure connectivity with them. As Telehealth crosses borders and reaches remote areas, have your video stream auto adjust with different internet bandwidth as well as available offline. This is something to be built in during the architecture of the application using adaptive bitrate streaming. Content availability ensures reliability for the platform.

One of the popular apps – Doxy, still runs as a web app and does not require the user to download anything.

These are some of the ways that can drive growth for Telehealth platforms. To read more check out our?blog

Telehealth platforms are at an exciting stage where the technology, the ecosystem, and opportunity are meeting in resonance. By driving the right strategy, a telehealth entrepreneur can drive towards success.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with me at?[email protected]

Thanks for reading, I hope it helps you!