The healthcare industry has experienced enormous change and uncertainty in 2020 and left many wondering how to prepare for the future. If there’s one thing this year has taught us, it’s that you can’t prepare for everything. Here we’ll focus on preparing your revenue cycle for the future of healthcare based on some changes we’ve seen take place this year.
Telehealth has changed drastically over time, especially throughout this global pandemic. Before the COVID-19 Pandemic, telehealth primarily focused on assisting a county outside of a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) or in Rural Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSA). After the pandemic, the CMS broadened access to Medicare telehealth services promoting Coronavirus preparedness and response supplemental appropriations act and section 1135 waiver authority. This meant that telehealth services must be accessible in any health care facility, including a physician’s office, hospital, nursing home, rural health clinic, or the patient’s home. Televisits, e-visits, telephone encounters, and virtual visits were additional billable services.
There are many pros to use telehealth, one being the cost. Telemedicine can reduce healthcare costs by up to 27% for those who pay for medical care. Telehealth makes having access to care easier for patients and collaboration easier for care teams. Telehealth is convenient for patients and offers you a competitive advantage over those practices that do not provide it.
It is essential to know some Telehealth policies that may become permanent:
As you prepare for the future of telemedicine, know that some things will adapt. Check-ins may look different as a brief check-in via telephone or other telecommunications device to decide whether an office visit or other service is needed may occur. Regarding e-visits, both the patient and the provider will have access to communication through an online patient portal. Telehealth provides the opportunity for two way conferencing between the patient and provider for real-time consultation. And the patient’s health and medical data will be sent in real-time for monitoring.
The three best ways to avoid an audit are:
For Medicare Telehealth visits:
For virtual check-in:
For e-visits:
It would be best to document all televisits, virtual check-ins, and e-visits in the patient's medical record.
There is a minimum of required documentation elements, and those include:
Analyze your telehealth operations:
Check-in with eClinicalWorks Telehealth solutions:
Healow Televisits:
healow Televisits no longer require login or downloads, there are no cost reminders, and no text logs either.
Hello2Healow:
With Hellow2Healow, it requires patients to enroll for h2h on the patient portal. No appointment is necessary in the h2h platform. H2h offers call logs, calling cards, healow analytics, the ability to call patients with one click, is mobile-friendly, offers healow analytics, and offers a way to online book appointments.
Feature Hellow2Healow Televisits
Requires appointment.......................N Y
eMobile...................................................Y N
Analytics.................................................Y Y
No login or download required.......N Y
Reminder................................................N Y
Online appointment booking..........N Y
Screen sharing.....................................N Y
eClinicalTouch......................................Y Y
According to the 2019 HIMSS report, nine out of ten healthcare organizations offer or pilot telehealth programs. Understanding why more healthcare providers embrace telehealth is vital, since value-based care and regulatory and reimbursement policies continuously must develop because of staffing challenges.
The same HIMSS article lays out these statistics:
Technology will keep becoming increasingly important in healthcare, since it is a requirement for telehealth appointments and services. You need to ask yourself these questions: “How well prepared is my organization to provide telehealth in portal management? In storing high volumes of data? In offering provider facing communication platforms? In offering secure text-based platforms for patient/physician communication? And, in offering secure video technology to connect doctors and patients?”
There are going to be setbacks. Whether this is a problem on the patient’s end regarding a poor connection, lack of necessary technology, or apprehensive to telehealth appointments compared to face-to-face interaction.
While face-to-face interaction is still most physician and patient #1 choice for appointments, telehealth is becoming more widely accepted since technology can improve access and outcomes. This is good since telehealth is here to stay. In the HIMSS article, the senior director of market insights says, "The pace of telehealth adoption is speeding up...(It is) driven by a desire to expand access to care, make care more convenient, address talent gaps and shortages, improve care coordination, better monitor and treat at-risk populations, and expand population health programs.”
Relating to the desire to make care more convenient, expect that patients will demand more end-to-end delivery of care options, including home medication delivery, as televisits become increasingly popular. Even if this is problematic to you at first glance, building and enforcing trust is vitally important to sustain a healthy and continued use of online and home-based services. Point of care devices and home-based monitoring devices are digital tools that you can expect to become popularized in establishing remote communication between providers and patients.
It is vitally important that your practice requires a solid training and development program. Requiring that your staff is up to date in all alternative approaches, training, skill identification, measurement, and reinforcements to everyday practices is a great way to prepare for the future of healthcare.
Struggling to keep up with upgrades and implement new features? We can help.
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