It is well known that telemedicine enhances a provider’s ability to achieve higher quality healthcare at a reduced cost to the patient. Now it’s time to better understand the critical role of interoperability in telemedicine.
To continue with the advancement in productivity, quality, and financial sustainability interoperability in telemedicine plays a very significant role.
What is Interoperability in Telemedicine?
Utilizing telemedicine is not only about getting on a video call consultation with patients. Interoperability in telemedicine enhances the care delivery model by seamlessly integrating with other digital devices to ensure real-time data management during ongoing virtual consultations. Within the healthcare ecosystem, interoperability is a step forward in standardizing care across the continuum and providing access to the right information at the right time, irrespective of the patient’s care setting.
Why is it important to choose a telemedicine solution with robust interoperability?
Usually smaller or rural practitioners pass on high-risk patients to larger healthcare systems. Here interoperable telemedicine solutions play a very important role in sharing patient records directly to the larger healthcare system during a telehealth visit. This automated and seamless data transfer between referring and consulting providers saves time and maintains continuity of care for patients. Also, the patient record is automatically updated with the summarized results of the. Without interoperable telehealth, the whole process would be inefficient and would involve manual entries that follow longer time durations and risk of transcription errors.
How has the current demand for telemedicine impacted interoperability?
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of telemedicine solutions worldwide. At this point it’s not about how virtual visits are getting conducted, it’s about the patient experience during the virtual visit. Therefore, it becomes critical to look at the overall integration of respective services and how they seamlessly integrate to develop an effective virtual care delivery model.
Issues with clinical systems that are not interoperable with your virtual care systems
- Access to relevant patient data during a virtual consultation
- Lower patient engagement
- Unnecessary steps or clicks
- Inability to coordinate care
- Siloed telehealth-related data
- Burdensome patient experience
These are just a few examples of how a lack of interoperability within telemedicine can impact patient care.
If you are planning to deploy or switch to a robust Virtual Care Platform, receive a live demonstration of digital healthcare solutions provided by iPatientCare and ready your practice with the best.
