What Do Patients Expect From a Telemedicine Platform and Provider?
The patient experience is the most important part of delivering telemedicine services. If it isn’t simple, patients won’t take part, and you will have invested in a system that doesn’t provide significant benefit to your practice. We’ll explore some patient requirements and why it’s important to work with someone who can manage them for you.
Patients Expect to Connect Without Hassle
Patients don’t only want a telemedicine platform– they want telemedicine that is simple to access. Pick a telemedicine platform that limits the number of steps necessary for patients to connect to an appointment. While telemedicine can represent a huge improvement in convenience, downloading software, setting up usernames and passwords, verifying email addresses and entering account information is cumbersome for those who aren’t tech savvy and tedious for those who are.
With Mend, patients click a link, enter their birthdate and connect to the virtual exam room for access to their telemedicine provider. It’s that simple. They can access telemedicine from any device with an internet connection, camera and microphone. The technology is fully HIPAA-compliant and secure while simultaneously offering the simplest-to-use interface on the market.
Patients Expect Status Updates
Doctors run late. Most patients understand that reality, but they appreciate being kept in the loop if the practice is running behind. With telemedicine, there is no human at the front desk to ask about wait times. Mend understands the importance of patient experience with a telemedicine platform, so we built tools to enable staff and providers to communicate with patients. If a provider is running behind and another patient logs in while the provider is with the last patient, the provider receives a notification and can send a text to the waiting patient with just one click. If a patient is waiting in a session and the telemedicine provider is not logged in, a text is sent to the provider to let them know. Providers and staff can easily send text messages to patients with wait times, last-minute reminders and other information, and these messages are one-way communications that patients cannot reply to. Patients are aware of the status of their appointment with just a few clicks.
Working with a telemedicine platform partner who understands the patient experience makes all the difference.
Patients Expect Reliability
You should be confident that your patients will be able to connect to the telemedicine platform every time they try. When you’re selecting your platform, check into the reliability and session completion rates for each different option. If a platform has a 10 percent non-completion rate, that means that you could miss 10 percent of your sessions every day because the solution isn’t reliable. 99.85 percent of sessions that are started in Mend are successfully completed.
Patients Expect Technical Help Right Away
We’ll leave the medical advice and follow up to the medical professionals, but technical support shouldn’t fall on medical office staff or providers. Pick a telemedicine platform partner who has incredibly low support utilization but who still offers unlimited support without additional fees. Low support utilization means that people rarely need technical support, but the availability indicates that the help is there if necessary.
Technical support has to be reactive, but it should also be proactive. Your solutions should be able to diagnose potential connection issues prior to report so they can be automatically resolved. Mend identifies potential connection issues, tests the microphone and camera and verifies that the patient is on a sufficient Internet connection. We offer free, unlimited, instant, in-house support for patients, providers and staff, so that help is there in the rare instance that you need it.
How Will You Handle Patient Expectations?
The convenience of telemedicine cannot be overstated, but it has to be matched with simplicity to be a truly valuable tool for your organization. Mend can offer all of the above and more while adding considerable value to your daily operations.