How do you prepare in advance to ensure your telemedicine program is sustainable and delivers healthcare equality?
In this article, we explore 3 key factors to consider in selecting the right telemedicine platform for your needs based on insights from our customers' real-world applications and experience. These factors are:
Each factor develops critical sub-categories to consider before selecting your telemedicine solution, helping you make an informed decision and provide equitable healthcare to your community or customers.
DEPLOYMENT MANAGEMENT
Once Deployed, Are You Equipped For Changes And Growth?
Anyone who has ever deployed a rural healthcare solution knows that change happens. Devices, locations, personnel. Nothing is permanent; shift is inevitable.
A robust deployment platform is vital to running a sustainable program, but several elements should be at your disposal for it to be considered as such.
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1. Deployment Management: Can You Monitor The Point Of Care And The Provider Side?
The right deployment management solution gives you a dashboard to monitor who and what is used and provides insight into the success or missteps of the deployment. This is the foundation to make it sustainable.
Caution! All this monitoring must be done while maintaining the complete privacy of sacred healthcare information, which must be treated as such. The GALE platform encrypts all healthcare information on the devices or deletes it to fit the customer's needs.
2. Training: How Long Does Incorporating New Participants Into Your Program Take?
3. Customization: How Easily Can You Integrate Your Existing Workflow Into A New Telemedicine Program?
To be equipped for changes and growth, Deployment Management, Training, and Customization are the three pillars of an effective Telemedicine platform, each playing a vital role in ensuring your program thrives in the face of change and growth.
PROGRAM ANALYTICS
Once Deployed, Do You Understand Your New Needs?
Going beyond a robust Deployment Management System is having dynamic analytics. Tracking what's being used, how often, who's using the system, and who isn't —having the needed insights to anticipate, understand, and address new needs.
An effective telemedicine platform equips you with the analytics to change the deployments, devices, and configurations or add clinics or services. Such analytics have an essential duality.
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1. Monitoring: Can You Gather Info on Usability, Devices Issues, and More?
You can’t fix what you don’t measure; understanding what's happening in the field is imperative. Your telemedicine platform should enable you to monitor changes as they happen, providing the necessary measurements to improve and adapt swiftly.
In-depth analytics empowers you to address issues and succeed rather than overlook and fail. Considerable deployment failings can often be traced back to simple problems. A doctor or Community Health Worker who needs more guidance in the system is resolved with the incorporated ease-to-use training or a support call. A faulty device is solved by sending a replacement.
GALE analytics identify these issues early on, allowing you to solve them before they become more prominent and hinder the success of your Telemedicine program.
2. Visibility: Does It Provide Demographic Charting and Business Intelligence?
Without a doubt, in-depth analytics and business intelligence reporting shed vital light on understanding your new needs after deployment, ensuring your telemedicine program's continued success and adaptability.
DIAGNOSTIC DEVICES
Once Deployed, Are You Ready to Provide More?
After understanding the need for dynamic analytics, it is fundamental to support a device-agnostic approach - including advanced sensors and applications - that supports remote physicians with vital clinical information to make better diagnoses.
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1. Diagnosing: Are Your Devices and Applications Sufficient?
Using devices in telemedicine used to mean just pulse oximetry, blood pressure, and glucose monitoring. This is a must but never sufficient. To provide significant value and answer the pain points of rural telemedicine in 2023, healthcare organizations require much more advanced diagnostic devices and the ability to include health apps, all integrated into an easy-to-use platform. Rural schools in Utah use GALE with hearing and vision screening apps to remotely provide additional health screening to students, and see great benefits to their school-based healthcare.
GALE is an open platform that integrates industry-leading diagnostic devices, such as AI-based handheld ultrasound, electrocardiogram, and a variety of health apps - diagnostic capabilities that are essential for prenatal care and pediatric health screening. By being open, GALE also allows new devices and innovations from different vendors to be added as technology evolves.
2. Adapting: Can You Modify Your Toolkit For Each Location?
3. Security: Is Patient Health Data Secure When Using Diagnostic Devices?
Having an open ecosystem of advanced diagnostic devices as part of your Telemedicine platform solution, you can provide cutting-edge solutions that cater to a wide range of healthcare needs.
In conclusion, ensuring your telemedicine program's sustainability and equality hinges on carefully considering key factors: Deployment Management, Analytics, and Devices.
Deployment Management: encompassing effective monitoring, swift training, and seamless customization, establishes the foundation for adaptability in the face of inevitable changes and growth.
Dynamic Analytics: offering insights into usage patterns, usability, and demographic data empowers you to effectively anticipate and address evolving needs.
Device-agnostic Approach: ensures diagnostic devices are adaptable, and patient data security facilitates the provision of diverse and cutting-edge healthcare solutions.
By prioritizing these elements, your telemedicine program can thrive, delivering equitable healthcare and remaining sustainable in the ever-changing landscape of medical technology and patient needs.
About 19Labs
19Labs is the creator of GALE, a Next Generation Point-of-Care platform for pharmacies, schools, workplaces, and rural communities. GALE brings together cutting-edge diagnostic technologies from industry leaders like Zoom, Elo, Amwell, Samsung Mobile, MIR, Omron, Viasat, EchoNous, PAP Link, and many others in one smart, efficient, and cost-effective platform. It was designed from the ground up to be operated by non-healthcare professionals in locations with limited infrastructure and optimized for low bandwidth and intermittent connectivity. To learn more about GALE, please visit www.19labs.com.