Azalea Health Shows That a Telehealth Platform Needs More Than the Cloud

There’s fierce competition in the telehealth space, which is good because each company can approach telehealth from different angles and try out a variety of services. Azalea Health is one of the vendors offering a comprehensive electronic health record (EHR) platform with online scheduling, telehealth, payments, and analytics, all in the cloud. To make this work takes more than a big portfolio of services: it requires the right attitude—especially since they are making a special bid for the rural provider market, which has diminished resources (both financial and human) and has been suffering for years.

Optimizing for the Clinician

Baha Zeidan, co-founder and CEO of Azalea, says that the company has worked hard to make its EHR reduce clinical effort instead of increasing it. The burgeoning roster of data that physicians must submit to regulators has gotten cumbersome. As one article put it: “Practices overwhelmingly said that federal feedback on MIPS evaluations has not helped them improve their performance in regard to costs (92%) and quality (88%).” What went wrong?

First, the new data being collected might not help physicians deliver better care now, but could help in the future if it could be aggregated and analyzed. In other words, collecting data is only half of the job. What the healthcare field is doing now is like collecting grain from the fields. We’re not separating the wheat from the chaff or actually making bread—we need to turn the data into meaningful information.

Second, the new data being requested is probably already in the EHR. If physicians find the regulations a burden, that’s because their EHR system likely isn’t exploiting the cloud for data organization. Most EHRs are unintelligently demanding that physicians re-enter data already contained in the EHR.

Azalea is making a smarter and better system by thinking about the user experience, keeping simplicity in mind, and addressing dynamic regulations. Zeidan suggests that traditional EHR vendors can become just as overwhelmed as the physicians by the pace of regulation. Their EHR developers are stretched to their limits just adding new features each year and running them through quality assurance. Without a proper strategy, they don’t have time to think about optimizing the process for clinicians.

Azalea, in contrast, believes in integrating telehealth into the physician’s workflow. Their analysts and product managers invest time listening to the providers, and work continuously to simplify the user experience. And because interface changes can confuse the users and put up hurdles to data entry, each new change is rolled cautiously out with explanations.

The Importance of Telehealth in Rural Settings

Rural areas have always lagged behind large cities in attracting clinical professionals. Recent trends—COVID-19 shortages, the increased chronic conditions among aging populations, and the economic hollowing out of the heartland—have made staffing problems even harder. Zeidan says that nurses in particular are leaving the countryside for higher-paying jobs in the city.

Some online telemedicine services maintain their own rosters of clinicians, and assign patients to doctors they have never seen before. Azalea emphasizes online visits with doctors with whom the patients already have relationships. At the same time, telehealth in rural areas allows access to specialists who otherwise would be many hours away. Getting quick advice from a remote physician or specialist, for instance, can save lives.

Azalea’s analytics lets clinicians see with a couple clicks who’s leaving the system and whether clinicians are following through with treatments. Online visits are conducted securely over Twilio, which is probably the best-known and most popular online telecommunications service.

The scheduling system integrates in-patient and telehealth visits. And perhaps most importantly, Azalea integrates mental and physical health. Many ill patients develop depression or other mental health problems, and mental health problems can be hidden behind physical conditions.

I was impressed at hearing what Azalea is doing, but at the same time I wish all health services could be conveniently integrated without the need for acquisitions or duplicated products. Rural communities deserve excellent health care, and might halt their decline with the kind of integrated services we see in Azalea.

About the author

Andy Oram

Andy is a writer and editor in the computer field. His editorial projects have ranged from a legal guide covering intellectual property to a graphic novel about teenage hackers. A correspondent for Healthcare IT Today, Andy also writes often on policy issues related to the Internet and on trends affecting technical innovation and its effects on society. Print publications where his work has appeared include The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM (Brussels), DebConf, and LibrePlanet. Andy participates in the Association for Computing Machinery's policy organization, named USTPC, and is on the editorial board of the Linux Professional Institute.

   

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