As a healthcare professional practicing telemedicine, there are a few common mistakes to make when approaching virtual healthcare via video call online. To avoid putting your patients, your patience (pun intended) and your practice through suffering from three of these common mistakes we’ve listed them for you to help you stay away from them.
Naturally the reputation of your practice is paramount, and as providers of a platform for telemedicine video chatting, it is important to us that your launch of an online practice extension to your medical office goes smoothly. That way, Banty Virtual Clinic can continue to be your first choice for telehealth video conferencing software, as your telemedicine virtual practice continues to prosper. We want your telehealth virtual clinic to succeed.
Telemedicine video calls bring a certain freedom with them. And that’s wonderful. At banty, we’re all about the liberating effect of the video call online. In fact, the freedom telehealth care video conferencing software gives you as a doctor or a healthcare professional is something we often like to discuss and highlight. And it’s the first point I made in a previous article.
And this new freedom can be exciting. You’re embracing a new age so you might be tempted to feel everyone else is too. Health care as it should be. Content, not exterior. Theoretically, you should be able to deliver healthcare in your pyjamas while eating breakfast or shirtless while you sit by the pool, or even the ocean. Except most of your patients haven’t really embraced that mentality yet.
The truth is that telemedicine via video chat isn’t only a major transition for doctors and healthcare professionals who are new to it. It’s also a major transition for the majority of the world’s patients. And it might sometimes be a challenge for you to integrate these patients into a healthcare model with heavy reliance on telemedicine video chatting. Adding unorthodox presentation of care to the equation might just prove a little too much.
What you should do is take your telehealth virtual meeting in an appropriately lit office-style room, decorated in the clean, sterile setting common to doctors’ offices. A couple of anatomical charts in the background might be in order. In fact, it might even help if you wear a whitecoat and a stethoscope on the video call even though you don’t “technically” need to, just to be safe.
Doctors and other healthcare professionals might sometimes face some unique challenges when they transition to telemedicine video conferencing. Some of your potential challenges during a telemedicine video conference are discussed in a previous article. However, these challenges are not your purview alone. For many of your patients, telemedicine virtual meetings are just as much of a transition as they are or were for you. And while you can share some literature to help them better prepare for a video conference with you, many of them will be approaching telehealth video calls at a comparatively older age, having spent a significant portion of their lives receiving exclusively in-person healthcare.
Whether you become frustrated with some aspects of the transition on your end, or you become frustrated with the way your telemedicine video call patients are handling your instructions, it is important to not allow your frustration to show. The first link to a previous article under this section (point number 2) mentions a few ways to ensure better communication with your patients and hopefully make things a little smoother for both of you. Of course, if you can’t help but show frustration at some point during a video conference, make sure to communicate clearly to your patient that you’re frustrated with the process, not with him or her. Even if you are actually frustrated with him or her.
Another topic mentioned in a previous article, patient privacy is as paramount during a telehealth virtual meeting as it is during an in-person medical appointment. However, there are some differences in how patient privacy is secured during a virtual medical appointment as opposed to an in-person one. Virtual medical appointments via telehealth video calls need to fulfill a number of security requirements.
Firstly, virtual medical appointments should be held via secure telehealth video conferencing solutions, such as Banty Virtual Clinic. Make sure to vet the security credentials of any virtual medical appointment software that you choose to use for telehealth video conferencing. Once you’re sure the software you use for telemedicine video conferences is secure, turn your attention towards your working room.
Physically securing the room you remotely work from during, before and after a telehealth video conference is important because information can be physically stolen in many ways, and digital attacks can be blended with physical attacks (such as installing a flash drive which infects your computer with malicious software).
You should also secure any devices you use for telemedicine because there are remote ways to access the telemedicine video call related information stored on these devices. This will involve learning a little bit about how malware infects devices as well as teaching it to your staff (and household if you bring your device home), but the process will bring you considerable peace of mind.
Keep away from the don’ts highlighted above for a smoother telemedicine experience on your video calls with your patients. There are other things to avoid doing on video conferencing solutions with patients of course, but these are the three major ones.
