How To Reduce Outpatient Congestion with Telehealth
Address provider shortages, streamline visits, and more
Does it feel like your clinic can’t keep up with all the traffic coming in? Are you concerned that your current providers are being pulled in too many directions, potentially sacrificing quality of care?
With telehealth, it’s possible to address your provider shortage and congestion concerns without expanding office space or adding new administrative staff.
Below, we’ll explore how telehealth can be used to address many of your outpatient concerns.
Telehealth can streamline appointment check-ins and visits
A patients' most common complaint is feeling rushed during doctor visits and their concerns not being addressed. This has been shown to directly affect patient satisfaction scores and outcomes.
While providers want to allocate time properly for each patient, this can be challenging when they’re seeing a large volume of people every day. Inevitably, this causes them to prioritize numbers over quality.
Thankfully, virtual care can help with that.
Implement virtual urgent care to organize patient flow
Not every patient situation requires an in-person visit. In fact, you could prioritize it so that only certain circumstances qualify for in-person appointments, maximizing the time of your on-site provider.
For instance, imagine how much more time in-clinic providers can spend with patients if your organization does the following:
Reviews imaging and lab results via videoconference.
Manage medication refill requests via text message.
Respond to non-urgent patient questions by utilizing a portal to send secure messages.
Complete audio consultations for follow-up visits.
Reduce the wait time with virtual urgent care
In addition to rushed consultations, patients dislike sitting in a waiting room for extended periods of time. One report revealed that 84% of people believe that wait time is important to the overall experience at a doctor’s office. Additionally, 20% said they’d switch doctors due to wait time, and 30% have left an appointment due to long waits.
By adding virtual care as an option, you can prioritize more urgent cases for in-person care and direct low-acuity patients to your telehealth option.
In addition, asynchronous telehealth makes it possible for patients to complete intake forms and questionnaires before their in-person appointment. This speeds up the check-in process and reduces overall wait-times.
Telehealth prevents delayed care
It’s typical for providers to be booked out months in advance. Whether it’s a result of provider shortages or a high demand for specialty care services, these obstacles aren’t just a patient annoyance—they can pose significant barriers to health outcomes.
As one 2022 study stated, “Delays in medical care may increase morbidity and mortality risk among those with underlying, preventable and treatable medical conditions.” Therefore, it’s important to consider ways technology can help combat these issues.
When you’re restricted to only working with local physicians, this limits how many patients you can help at any given time. However, by implementing virtual urgent care, or partnering with a telehealth provider, your clinician pool expands significantly.
Some common issues a remote practitioner can assist with include:
Earaches
Pink eye
Nausea
Skin conditions
Influenza
Joint pain
Urinary tract infections (UTI)
And more
Instead of dealing with a long wait list and delayed care, you can take on more patients and prioritize preventative care.
Capture revenue by offering care around the clock
Patients who work 9 to 5 have a difficult time scheduling appointments without calling off from their jobs. As a result, many of them just forgo care altogether. The same goes for individuals with children, as finding adequate childcare can be problematic.
Sure, you could possibly open your clinic doors earlier, keep them open later, or provide weekend availability, but this doesn’t come without additional expenses and risks. For instance, you’d need to hire office staff, identify providers who are okay working after hours and pay more clinic utilities. Plus, patient volume will be unpredictable.
Better accommodate patients with 24/7 virtual care
A 2020 study reviewing the quality and safety of virtual urgent care established that, when correctly deployed, it is a "pragmatic strategy to care for larger numbers of patients.”
Instead of restricting your patients to limited hours, allow them to get care when they need it most. Their acute concerns can be resolved quickly, opening up in-person availability for more urgent cases and eliminating the need for more costly care later.
Offer your patients more treatment options
Building and maintaining a virtual arm for your clinic or practice can be daunting. But what if we told you there was a way to offer your patients the latest treatments, all under your brand, without any of the operational headaches?
OpenLoop has the complete, white-label infrastructure needed to fully support a virtual program for your patients. You simply bring your patients, we do everything else. Our nationwide network of providers can see patients from anywhere, anytime, in all 50 states. Let us help you expand your breadth of services while you focus on providing exceptional in-person care to your patients.
Learn more about our nationwide provider network and white-label virtual care infrastructure.
Ready to learn more? Contact us today!