Making Telehealth Work for Your Practice Today, Tomorrow, and 10 Years from Now

Telemedicine is here to stay. Whether you’ve been using it for years or just getting started, the digital playing field has changed during the pandemic and continues to evolve. To get and keep everyone in your practice on board, consider prioritizing some of these efforts:

• Stay on Congress to understand the importance of telehealth to patients in post-acute and long-term care. Reach out to your congressional representatives’ offices and share how telehealth visits have made a difference in your patients’ lives and the value of these services during quarantines, for patients in rural areas, and to enable access to specialists who are unable to come to facilities for visits.
• Assess the actual impact of telehealth on your practice, particularly in value streams such as clinical outcomes, quality, and safety; access to care; patient, family, and caregiver experiences; clinician experiences; financial and operational impact; and health equity.
• Learn to master next-level telehealth practices in 2021. Identify opportunities to transition into a new era of digital health and plan now for necessary investments in equipment, upgrades, and training.
• Don’t let growth of telehealth take away from team-based care. There is no substitute to a team approach to care and regular engagements with colleagues, patients, families, and others, as well as efforts such as rounding, quality improvement meetings, and group problem-solving.
• Understand the benefits of using telehealth for integrated behavioral health care. The pandemic heightened the need for behavioral health care as well as the limited availability of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health professionals. Telehealth can fill this gap, so take time to identify professionals you can partner with for these services.
• Prioritize bringing warmth to your telehealth visits. Ask about a photo on the patient’s nightstand or a picture on their wall. Talk about their family and how they’re doing generally. Ask about what’s on their meal tray and how they’re eating. If you already know the patient, talk about familiar things. If the patient is new to you, take this time to get to know them. For first-time telehealth patients, introduce the technology and how it works, and ask if they have questions.

Check out AMDA's Telehealth resource page for additional information.