Overview

Telemedicine is a powerful tool that was introduced in the 1950s to make healthcare more accessible and cost effective for the general public. It had helped patients especially in rural areas to virtually consult physicians and get prompt treatment for their illnesses.

Telemedicine empowers healthcare professionals to gain access to patient information and remotely monitor their vitals in real time.

In layman terms, Telemedicine is the virtual manifestation of the remote delivery of healthcare services. Today, we have 3 types of telemedicine services;

• Virtual Consultation: Allowing patients and doctors to communicate in real time while adhering to HIPAA compliance
• EHR Handling:  Empowering providers to legally share patient information with healthcare professionals
• Remote Patient Monitoring: Enabling doctors to monitor patient vitals remotely using mobile medical devices to read and transmit data.

The demand from a technology embracing population has brought in a higher rate of its adoption today.

Telemedicine can be operated in numerous ways. The standard format is by using a video or voice-enabled call with a HIPAA compliant tool based on the country of operation. There are also other ways in which portable telemedicine kits with computers and medical devices are used for patient monitoring enabled with video.

Need of the Hour

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced healthcare systems and providers to adapt the situation by adopting telemedicine services to protect both the doctors and patients from the virus. This has entirely changed the scenario of how we will look at healthcare and consultation services going forward. This adoption of the modern telemedicine services has proven to bring in more convenience, cost saving and new intelligent features that enhance the doctor and patient experience and engagement significantly.

The continuous advancements and innovation in technology and healthcare practices significantly improve the usability and adoption of telemedicine across the industry. In the next couple of years, the industry is to see a massive integration of telemedicine services across practices in the country.

A paper titled, “Telehealth transformation: Covid19 and the rise of Virtual Care” from the journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, analyzes the adoption of telemedicine in different phases during the pandemic.

During the initial phase of the pandemic when the lockdown was enforced, telemedicine found the opportunity to scale as per the situation. It dramatically decreased the proportion of in-person care and clinical visits to reduce the community spread of the virus.

As the causalities from the pandemic intensified, there was a peak in demand for inpatient consultations with the help of TeleICUs. This was perfectly suited to meet the demands of inpatient care while reducing the virus spread, expanding human and technical resources, and protecting the healthcare professionals.

With the pandemic infection rates stabilizing, telemedicine was proactive in engaging with patients and effectively managing the contingencies. As restrictions relaxed with declining infection rates, the systems will see a shift from a crisis mode to a sustainable and secure system that preserve data security and patient privacy.

The Future of Telemedicine

With the pandemic economy serving as an opportunity to scale, telemedicine has evolved to a cost effective and sustainable system. The rapid advances in technology enable telemedicine to evolve faster.

The future of Telemedicine revolves around Augmented reality with the virtual interactions simulated in the same user plane. Both Apple and Facebook are experimenting with their AR technology and are expected to make a launch soon.

Now Telemedicine platforms are evolving like service desks, to measure efficiency and productivity. This helps to track the value realizations contributed to the patients and the organization.

The ZIF™ Empowerment

ZIF™ helps customers scale their telemedicine system to be more effective and efficient. It empowers the organization to manage healthcare professionals and customer operations in a New Age Digital Service Desk platform. ZIF™ is a HIPAA compliant platform and leverages the power of AI led automation to optimize costs, automate workflows and bring in an overall productivity efficiency.

ZIF™ keeps people, processes and technology in sync for operational efficiency. Rather than focusing on traditional SLAs to measure performance, the tool focuses more on end user experience and results with the help of insights to improve each performance parameter.

Here are some of the features that can evolve your existing telemedicine services.

AIOps based Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics Platform

Patient engagements can be assisted with consultation recommendations with their treatment histories. The operations can be streamlined with higher productivity with quicker decision making and resolutions. A unified dashboard helps to track performance metrics and sentiment analytics of the patients.

AI based Voice Assistants and Chatbots

Provide consistent patient experience and reduce the workload of healthcare professionals with responses and task automations.

Social Media Integration

Omnichannel engagement and integration of different channels for healthcare professionals to interact with their patients across social media networks and instant messaging platforms.

Automation

ZIF™ bots can help organizations automate their workflow processes through intuitive activity-based tools. The tool offers over 200+ plug and play workflows for consultation requests and incident management.

Virtual Supervisor

The Native machine learning algorithms aid in initial triaging of patient consultation requests to the right healthcare professional with its priority assignment and auto rerouting tickets to the appropriate healthcare professional groups.

ZIF™ empowers healthcare organizations to transform and scale to the changing market scenarios. If you are looking for customized solutions for your telemedicine services with the help of ZIF™, feel free to schedule a Demo with us today.

https://zif.ai/