By adding a telemedicine element to the clinic, you are choosing to take your medical practice to the next level. This is very important, as many of your counterparts have likely gone this route already and are seeing numerous benefits as a result.
When you give patients the power to log into an online doctor’s appointment from wherever they might be situated, you are showing a flexible and innovative approach that will not go unnoticed.
Beyond that, making such a strategic shift will positively impact your clinic in a number of ways, including:
Rethinking How Your Clinic Functions
It is easy to find a specific way of doing things and decide to stay the course. After all, the course is tried, true, and safe. You have worked within it for years and your patients seem satisfied.
However, once you venture outside of that course and begin offering telemedicine services (like regular video call consultations), this type of change will inherently make you rethink how else your clinic could be improved.
Some of these improvements may be related to how you practice online medicine, while others could be straightforward adjustments like altering office hours, marketing your clinic better, or freshening up the team with new hires.
The Promoting of Patient Convenience
Give some patients a dose of truth serum, and they will quickly tell you how inconvenient it can be for them to book and attend an in-person doctor’s appointment.
While the actual appointment itself may be 20 minutes in length, adding commute time, paid parking, and many minutes spent in the waiting room, makes the whole experience far more stressful than it needs to be.
When your practice welcomes telemedicine to its list of services, patients tired of the in-person doctor’s appointment process will be thrilled to have a new, more convenient option available to them. This could lead to positive word of mouth, and perhaps an influx in new patients.
Having a Less Crowded Waiting Room
From a clinic’s perspective, a crowded waiting room is a double-edged sword. Yes, it’s great that so many people trust your practice. But on the other hand, having so many people in this space means in-person appointments are running behind, your administrative team is constantly under siege, and viruses are potentially being passed from one person to another.
Giving patients the chance to see their doctor over a video call will provide much relief. Of course, there will still be a waiting room in a virtual medicine environment, but it will feel far less uncomfortable than an in-person one.
Speaking of, those who have to come in for an in-person visit will not be upset by the extra elbow room afforded to them thanks to your telehealth initiatives.
Broadening of Patient Interactions
Chances are you will have a cross-section of patients who appreciate a live video chat online with their doctor, as well as the occasional in-person visit. This is a great thing.
For these individuals, they will have more options available to them when it comes to seeking out an appointment with their doctor. As an example, someone looking to discuss a prescription will be able to do that in a virtual visit, instead of travelling in for a brief conversation.
Without broadening your practice’s patient interaction strategy to include video calls, this wouldn’t be possible. That patient would instead have to dedicate an inordinate amount of time to getting to and from the clinic just to get a couple questions answered.
Embracing Change
Perhaps most importantly, embracing telemedicine shows patients that you are willing to change with the times, and allow them to have a video conference with their doctor.
Doing this proves to patients that your clinic is doing whatever it can to improve how it cares for them. This only increases the trust and faith someone has in their medical practitioner.
If you are looking to bring in a top telemedicine solution into your clinic, tap here to learn more about how Banty Virtual Clinic and its video chat app can revolutionize how you meet with patients.
