To avoid wasting money, telehealth should be personalized to the needs of patients based on cognitive/physical capacity, home setting, social determinants, caregiver support, and the patient's ability to reliably and fully participate.
Fremont CA: Any telehealth program, regardless of its scale, staffing structure, or patient demographics, is designed to involve patients in their own treatment, motivate them to change lifestyle behaviors, and give them more influence over their conditions. In order to accomplish these objectives, healthcare professionals must consider what realistic steps they can take at the start of a telehealth enrollment to improve patient participation in the short term and patient empowerment in the long run.
Using Eligibility Criteria that are Clearly Defined
It is critical to identify sound eligibility requirements before implementing a telehealth program and to update the criteria on a regular basis based on real experience. To avoid wasting money, telehealth should be personalized to the needs of patients based on cognitive/physical capacity, home setting, social determinants, caregiver support, and the patient's ability to reliably and fully participate.
The company would want to make sure that the patients chosen for the telehealth service are the most likely to benefit. An effective program would enroll moderately at-risk patients who can still be encouraged to integrate new lifestyle interventions for self-management, rather than high-risk patients whose cognitive and/or physical conditions are unlikely to change through telehealth, using an EMR's algorithmic risk assessments, LACE ratings, or Strategic Healthcare Programs' hospitalization risk levels.
Staffing for Installation Visits: There are two approaches to installing telehealth equipment, each with its own collection of benefits and drawbacks: The installation may be done by either a clinician or a non-clinical installer. Clinically trained personnel are able to answer medical questions and provide instruction at a higher level than most per diem installers in the first model. However, it can be more difficult to keep a full team of nursing staff educated on how to do a telehealth setup than it is to teach one or more installers how to do it from a program-specific education standpoint. In any case, having an installation checklist will aid in maintaining accuracy and efficiency.
Caregiver Engagement: Schedule the installation visit as soon as possible so that a caregiver can get the same introduction to the software and guidance for equipment used as the patient. This will ease any patient apprehensions about learning new technology and strengthen the patient's network of supporters. Furthermore, both the patient and the program would benefit immensely if the caregiver had a way to remotely monitor the patient's routine telehealth adherence and communicate with the patient. These two aspects of caregiver engagement improve the patient's responsibility in sticking to the program and reduce the amount of non-clinical adherence-related outreach required by an organization.
