Elevating World-Class Healthcare to Home-Class Healthcare via Telehealth

The Ever-Important Role of Telehealth Today

Healthcare practices are constantly looking for new ways to elevate the patient experience, while optimizing business operations and identifying new service opportunities. That’s why more and more practices are embracing telehealth capabilities as an alternative option for servicing patients. Telehealth gives both practices and patients the ultimate flexibility, as patients can receive the same world-class care they would receive in-office, but from the comfort and convenience of their own homes, while practices can serve more patients and deliver more services in a given day.

But telehealth is about more than comfort and convenience. It’s also an important tool in times when person-to-person contact isn’t advisable – like during the current COVID-19 outbreak. In today’s climate, healthcare practices are being forced to adapt quickly to adhere to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recommendations and to keep patients and staff safe. As the virus continues to spread, the need to social distance and limit human contact is critical to preventing transmission. This is especially true for the elderly or those with weakened immune systems – sitting in a waiting room close to potentially infected persons or touching door handles and other equipment poses a serious risk to their health.

For practices, now is as good a time as ever to implement telehealth strategies as the federal government works to make these services more widely available. According to The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Medicare has begun temporarily paying clinicians across the country to provide telehealth services for beneficiaries. This act cuts through much of the red tape that had previously restricted telehealth care only to Medicare recipients with specific circumstances. Now, all Medicare patients are allowed to interact with their physicians or their social workers online, over the phone or through video chats.

How Clearwave Electronic Self Check-in Bolsters a Telehealth Strategy

Are you considering introducing telehealth capabilities to your practice? Perhaps you already offer telehealth as an option but are looking to further enhance the online patient experience? Or maybe you just want to increase the number of patients you can see remotely? In any of these cases, Clearwave’s electronic self check-in technology gives you the capabilities and the flexibility to deliver the most effective, personalized online patient experience possible – from pre-appoint through follow-up.  Below are just a few examples:

• Patients can receive a reminder both a day before, and the morning of their telehealth appointment complete with login information so they don’t have to search for it.
• Through Clearwave’s Mobile Pre-Check feature, new patients can provide vital pre-appointment information such as COVID-19 vulnerabilities or symptoms, demographic information and insurance eligibility without ever having to come in contact with another person.
• Prior to each appointment, staff can use Clearwave to verify patient information remotely using Mobile Pre-Check flags. If the patient is up to date, Clearwave can automatically launch a text message containing a link to the appropriate telehealth portal – now they are checked in!
• Practices can place their telehealth patients in a virtual waiting room, with no risk of human contact, to mimic the experience they would have in the office.
• Staff can monitor the online schedule to determine who will be seen next. They can also verify demographic information, send educational information relevant to a given patient, and notify the doctor that a patient is ready to be seen.

To better understand how Clearwave can assist in the telehealth pre-appointment process, we’ve created an infographic to walk you through the steps from the initial reminder, to the virtual appointment itself.

Maximize the Telehealth Potential

There’s never been a more critical time and a better opportunity to introduce or extend telehealth capabilities. Clearwave is here to help you realize the benefits of a virtual model even during the pre-appointment process – from issuing text and email appointment reminders, to collecting crucial pre-appointment information such as insurance eligibility, to protecting your patients and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay connected and put patients at ease by implementing telehealth visits. For more patients than ever, safe, remote access to their healthcare providers is now just a click away.