Banty Co-Founder and Medical Director, Dr. Richard Tytus, provided the subject matter and direction for this article.The author would like to thank Adam Grant for his editorial assistance in writing the article. Dr. Richard Tytus takes responsibility for the content of the article.
Like anything in life, success doesn’t just happen. There is a lot that leads up to finding success, the least of which includes working hard, being well-prepared, focusing on what’s important and having an undeniable ability to adjust on the fly.
As a healthcare professional, it is traits like these that have helped you reach this point of your career. Now, though, you are starting to see a shift in your industry. One where seeing a doctor at the brick-and-mortar medical clinic is no longer a must.
Thanks to the emergence of virtual medicine, it is now possible to see patients remotely via video call. While some medical appointments will – of course – still need to happen in-person, the flexibility to approach how patient consultations are done is available to you.
If you have chosen to start offering online doctor’s appointments, here’s how you can go about doing that successfully:
Do Your Research
There are a number of virtual medicine solutions available to those in the healthcare industry. As such, it is critical for each clinic to determine its needs and budget before selecting a solution to move forward with.
Banty Virtual Clinic is an easy, straightforward, and budget-friendly online medicine solution for healthcare professionals. Each client account comes with a custom Banty address (i.e., Banty.com/MyClinic) that can be created by the individual who uses it. This will make it unbelievably easy for patients to locate their physician online.
What’s more, Banty is HIPAA/PHIPA compliant for virtual medicine. Meanwhile, all appointments remain private and secure thanks to our use of end-to-end encryption.
Have Well-Trained Staff
As you know, whenever a new system or process is welcomed into a medical clinic, it’ll take time for staff to adjust. While familiarity is helpful, it’s always better if a staff instead has a solid working knowledge of what’s in front of them as soon as possible.
Before rolling out online medicine services to patients, see that your clinical team is 100% comfortable with the new technology being used, as well as how to approach patients about it. Not only will this make your staff more comfortable, but its knowledge will help patients feel confident about having an online doctor visit.
Now, once at this stage, be cognizant of which patients are first afforded the opportunity to have a live video chat online with you. With your practice still learning how to effectively offer patients video calls, test out such a service with longstanding patients that the practice has a quality relationship with. If something goes sideways during a video conference with them, this patient group will be more likely to forgive and continue meeting with you online in the future.
Move Away from Phone Appointments
For years, many healthcare professionals have been providing telemedicine/telehealth services to patients. By-and-large, these terms are associated with conducting patient appointments over the phone instead of at the clinic.
While this has been a relatively convenient solution for a long time, video calls are now a far more convenient and effective way to meet with patients remotely. A lot can be said about the importance of the visual element in which video conferencing provides.
By actually seeing the patient in a virtual environment, you can have a better idea as to how a patient is actually doing. You can see their face, their body language, as well any physical issues that are highly visible. Because of this, it can be easier to diagnose an issue.
What’s more, let’s not discount how important and comforting it is for a patient to see their doctor as a health matter is being discussed at length.
