You’ve done the research, gathered the facts, and now it’s time to implement an in-home monitoring strategy in your organization. But if you’re building the telehealth program from the ground up, you won’t necessarily know about some of the challenges you face until you come across them.
In the interest of helping you avoid impediments with the potential to disrupt your healthcare operations and negatively impact the quality of patient care you’re able to provide, let’s take a look at some of the biggest telehealth challenges you’re likely to encounter.
PROMOTING SUPERIOR PATIENT SUPPORT
Many elements of in-home healthcare are about empowering patients to take greater control over their own treatment. But simply dropping off medical equipment on your patient’s doorstep isn’t going to cut it. Be sure to offer your patients convenient access to customer support, as well as personal training or eLearning opportunities to resolve their own inquiries. Offering the same opportunities to your own employees will help them sharpen their on-the-job skills too, letting them stay focused on the task of providing care.
MANAGING BACK-END SHIPPING LOGISTICS FOR TELEHEALTH EQUIPMENT
Beginning an in-home monitoring program will result in the need to expand your logistical capabilities. That means working out purchasing, shipping, receiving, cleaning and distribution of a significantly expanded inventory. If you don’t have the bandwidth, you’d be wise to consider partnering with a telehealth services provider that will help you offload the non-clinical responsibility.
MAINTAINING FDA COMPLIANCE AND SECURITY STANDARDS
You already know of the immense potential of connected healthcare technology. But the benefits of this technology must be treated with the utmost respect for privacy. Data breaches and hacking can result in personal injury to patients, financial losses and serious legal exposure for your organization. At every step of the way, you must make sure that security is a top concern—both for your patients’ privacy rights, their wellbeing, and your own.
INTEGRATING YOUR TELEHEALTH PLATFORM WITH EXISTING SYSTEMS
It can be disruptive to move your operations to an entirely new system. Making sure that the transition is seamless requires you to carefully assess how your new remote patient monitoring system will integrate with the old. A failure to do so can result in missing gaps in patient records, or confusion as to how your personnel must fulfill their duties.
CAPITALIZING ON BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FROM YOUR TELEHEALTH PROGRAM
Your new in-home monitoring program will give your organization unique insights if you know where to look and how to interpret the healthcare data you collect. Medical devices themselves are a wealth of information, as is the information patients enter into their portal account. You should have resources in place to work with this data and turn it into actionable business intelligence to help you continually improve your telehealth program, and the lives of your patients.
Learn how an industry leading telehealth company can successfully implement an in-home monitoring program that meets to needs of your business, and your patients.