Telehealth Features – What’s Required?

As the telehealth adoption wave continues in healthcare, we thought we’d take the time to do a series of articles on a number of aspects of telehealth.  In this first series we’re going to look at various Telehealth features.  We’ll talk about whether those features should be considered essential.  We’ll evaluate nuances of when a feature might be nice to have and in other cases where it’s a deal breaker.  Hopefully, we’ll expose you to the best telehealth options out there.

Along the way, our goal is to help you get a better understanding of what features are possible with telehealth as you evaluate which telehealth company is best for you organization.  Yes, I’m sure you’ve all done some sort of telehealth implementation already, but did you implement the right telehealth software?  Are there better software out there?  Are there features on this list that other telehealth vendors have that make you want to switch telehealth companies?  Can you use the features on this list to drive your telehealth vendor to add new features?

A big thank you to Jim Tate, Chief Product Officer at MediVisum Telehealth Solutions, for writing this article which inspired and started as the seed topic for this list.  As he aptly pointed out, we learned during EHR adoption was that many were looking for a list of features that an EHR platform should include.  The same is true as healthcare organizations select a telehealth platform.  Regardless of what you’ve implemented already, you want a “complete” solution as Jim Tate described.

With that in mind, here’s our list of possible telehealth platform features:

Live Video Telehealth Features

Enterprise Telehealth Features

  • Digital Front Door
  • Specialty Specific Telehealth
  • Telehealth Devices, Walls, and Carts
  • Device Add-ons and Integrations
  • Telequarantine
  • Virtual Rounding
  • Team Based Solutions
  • Backup Capacity
  • RPM and CCM

We’ll plan to cover all of these in future articles in more detail and will update the list with links as we do.  Plus, as we come upon more features to write about, we’ll add them to the list.  In fact, if you have others you think we should add, let us know on our contact us page.

Rather than having us dictate what features are important to your organization, our goal with the above list is to share all of the possible features and options that are available.  Then, you can evaluate each option for your organization and use that to evaluate telehealth vendors.  As you’ll see in our full write ups of each telehealth feature, there will be some that we don’t think our essential.  Hopefully we can be as comprehensive as possible so you can know all the options out there as you make your long term telehealth purchase.

As part of our future articles, we’d be happy to share some examples of the features above.  If you’re a telehealth vendor that’s willing to share screenshots of how you’ve implemented a feature, be sure to reach out.  We’re open to seeing a wide variety of approaches and are especially interested in novel approaches that make something more usable or to make the workflow seamless for the patient.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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