Organizations face three major tasks when launching a telemedicine program throughout their clinical and administrative departments. These are the tasks of finding the best program for their specific needs, launching the program, and improving it. [1]
“Ultimately, people need to make their telemedicine programs sustainable,” explained Nirav Desai, founder and CEO of Hands on Telehealth and author of The 10 Secrets Of Telehealth Success. “Programs that run out of funds don’t have a leg to stand on. It’s important to figure out the ROI that can be made and the capital that can be gained from the very beginning.” Desai says there are three stages of developing a telemedicine program:
1. Investigation. “To start, it’s important to put together a pro forma. Basically, a projection of expenses and revenues associated with telemedicine programs,” explained Desai. “This would include equipment, overheads, paying clinicians for services and even bandwidth to ensure connectivity and productivity for both ends using the telemedicine program.” Another critical component, according to Desai, is to establish immediately how many patients might be seen and what profitability might be associated with them. Those key metrics will help an organization determine whether or not they received the volumes or revenues that were expected. “In some cases, based on initial investigation, you may get an ROI in a month or two. In other cases it may take a while longer,” said Desai.
2. Implementation. The Implementation Stage is an ongoing process. It involves training and motivating an organization’s staff. “When implementing a telemedicine program, it’s important to get it off the ground on the right foot,” Desai said. “One of the most important things after the Investigation Stage is to make sure your organization is actually taking the measurements of the metrics you had previously set up so you can establish a benchmark to compare to other programs.” Tracking those will be an important part of a quality telemedicine program.
3. Improvement. It’s important to assess the performance of any program so you can make adjustments and improve it moving forward. “Look at the metrics in place and see what’s going right and what’s not. How can you continue to grow? How can you get the volumes, the incomes, the expenses you were anticipating? You need to train and market whatever the solution is to your staff. Economics are driven by execution of a program,” said Desai. “Once your organization starts doing things well, you can figure out what to do even better and make those adjustments to expand your solution to even more people.”
For more information on implementing a telemedicine program and how to determine an organization’s specific needs, visit woundrounds.com for a free consultation.
[1] Deschenes, Steff. “3 stages of developing a telemedicine program.” Healthcare Finance News. 06 September 2012.
