Thanks to telemedicine, a surging number of medical professionals are effectively delivering health care to patients over long distances. Physicians are saving patients time and money by substituting an in-office visit with a virtual encounter via phone, tablet, or computer for common ailments. Hospitals are staffing “command centers” with specialty care teams who are responsible for monitoring sick patients in short-staffed rural intensive care units (ICUs).
While more than 50 percent of hospitals are now caring for patients through various telemedicine modalities and more physicians are expected to incorporate it within their standard of care, others are hesitant to adopt telemedicine because certain services may not be reimbursed by private insurance carriers and government payers.
But providers like direct primary care (DPC) physicians aren’t letting fee-for-service payment policies dictate how they practice medicine. They’ve opted out of insurance contracts altogether, freeing themselves from the rigid structure of billing codes, modifiers, and prior authorizations. Instead, these physician contract directly with their patients, offering them around-the-clock access to primary care medical needs in exchange for an affordable monthly fee. Phone calls, texts, e-mails, FaceTime, secure messaging platforms, and specialty consults – the most common uses of telemedicine – are included in a patient’s membership package.
Continuous Conversations With Patients
Direct care physicians pride themselves on keeping their practices small so they can spend more time with their patients. Asynchronous telemedicine, also known as “store and forward technology,” is a powerful tool may DPC providers use to further strengthen their patient relationships because it allows them to extend access to health care beyond the exam room.
“For a patient, life doesn’t happen in the confines of a brick and mortar doctor’s office,” says Dr. David Cunningham, a physician who opened a DPC practice in Massachusetts. “Communicating with patients throughout their lives can be very helpful for them. Telemedicine lets patients have that continuous conversation with their DPC physician…they have access to DPC from their pocket.”
Cunningham’s practice currently uses Spruce Health, a secure messaging platform that lets him correspond with his patients on inquiries ranging from which vitamin D tablet to buy or feedback on a diabetic patient’s reported blood sugars.
Platforms like Spruce also demonstrate how its other asynchronous features improve physician workflow while keeping patients satisfied. For example, if a patient thinks he may have a sinus infection, he has the option to answer a pre-scripted questionnaire related to the diagnosis at his own convenience. Once completed, it is sent to be reviewed by the physician. This communication style not only caters to both the physician and the patient’s separate schedules, but it also provides for better documentation because the questionnaire and all physician notes are downloaded into the patient’s electronic medical record (EMR). This is critical, given that patients tend to forget 80 percent of a physician’s verbal orders, and half of patients that do remember end up interpreting them incorrectly. Multiple studies show that, compared to verbal communication, written documentation shared by physicians has potential to better improve patient adherence.
To see how telemedicine benefits the medical community in other ways, see my latest posts here and here.
