A rapidly growing trend in the health care industry is the adoption of a virtual health platform. The virtual health platform is a service provided by a third-party insurer to connect physicians and patients for improved access to medical services.
By allowing patients to view their records remotely via a secure, online portal, patients can quickly and easily find out if they have a case of a health concern that requires immediate attention. In this way, a virtual health platform helps medical professionals manage their patients’ health information more effectively, allowing them to respond to patients more efficiently and prevent potential emergencies from turning into serious medical issues.
Medical professionals can use the virtual health platform to stay abreast of their patient’s medical issues, ensuring that they can quickly identify specific issues that require immediate attention. Patients can search for specific information about a condition and receive real-time advice from their doctors, without being forced to visit an office.
Chronic conditions often compound the stress on already busy patients to regularly attend appointments, go through routine medical tests, and adhere to complicated medication schedules. In a recent study of an independent sample of about 650 seniors, 34 percent of all in-person emergency care visits were deemed medically appropriate to be handled through a virtual health platform.
In addition to the increased efficiency that virtual health services can bring to an organization, the wide range of capabilities it provides its users makes it easy to provide a more comprehensive experience for both patients and medical professionals. Some of the features that come with a good virtual health platform include appointment reminders and alert management.
These advanced features ensure that patients always know when they have enough time to make their next appointment for a particular test or treatment, reducing the chances that they miss it entirely. Similarly, medical professionals can use their websites to send a text or email alerts when they have new patients, or new medications available at the pharmacy.
To take advantage of these new features, healthcare organizations need to invest in state-of-the-art telemedicine software. The best telemedicine software can integrate with the medical offices themselves, allowing them to create appointment lists and scheduling data that can be shared between the website and the actual offices. This reduces the time it takes for medical offices to schedule appointments using their computer systems.
By providing patients with real-time access to their appointments, as well as information about immunizations, glucose meters, and other important information, a virtual health platform is becoming a more common part of patient care. Patients often prefer visiting their doctors in person rather than using their computer, so a well-designed telemedicine software system is an ideal way to foster increased patient satisfaction and enhance collaboration between doctors and nurses.
With the help of a good telemedicine platform, medical professionals can also improve communication between doctors and their patients. For example, a medical team may be able to send a patient’s vital sign data directly to the patient’s physician or pharmacy, reducing waiting time on account of travel time and missed appointments. By incorporating electronic medical records into the same system that provides patients with their prescriptions and other important information, doctors and other care team members will be able to access patient data in a fraction of the time.