Telemedicine in urgent care and other spaces in the healthcare sector is increasingly becoming a safe, convenient, and affordable alternative with each passing day. Telehealth use grew almost one-third of all inpatient setups from twenty-fourteen to twenty-nineteen and every nine out of a collective sum of ten outpatient and inpatient providers are planning to invest in this booming industry in the next one-and-a-half years.
As the practices across the globe start preparing to integrate more telemedicine procedures, they are now in a position to offer their patients with more diverse and customized care. When it comes to improving patient health outcomes and also the quality of clinical care being provided, urgent care facilities, in particular, are turning out to be uniquely positioned.
CATERS TO THE RURAL COMMUNITIES MORE EFFICIENTLY
Among the most significant advantages of telemedicine is that it can be fully leveraged by the practices for offering superior care to the rural patient community. From video-based visits to remote patient monitoring that do not require an individual to travel great distances, with an operational telehealth system in place, the providers can now afford to serve the patients where they may be.
The practitioners can perform clinical examinations on their patients with great ease, specifically on those diagnosed with a critical condition, with the help of telehealth services. More often than not, rural patients traveling to an urgent care clinic are not able to come back for follow-ups because of a host of issues, such as time off work, childcare, and transportation. They might not afford to visit their primary care provider for the same set of reasons. Evidently, with telehealth, these concerns are to become a moot point for sure.
However, a section of the urban population may also suffer from selective access to care and virtual visits are to benefit these people as well. By offering telehealth services, including telemedicine appointment scheduling on the web, your urgent care will be able to follow up with them remotely, ensuring that those patients are complying with their prescribed courses of treatment and improving in a steadfast manner.
For instance, PatientMD, a relatively young player in the healthcare business has recently started offering its telemedicine services to cater the patients who live in and around Chicago, causing enough disruption in the US domestic market. After receiving phenomenal appreciation from the benefited patients as well as enlisted practices and businesses, the company is on the anvil of extending its comprehensive suite of telemedicine services to the resident Indians as well.
LOYALTY AND CONSISTENCY
Not everyone on earth can afford primary care. A twenty-fourteen to twenty-sixteen Kaiser study revealed that, in general, twenty-eight in every hundred males and seventeen in every hundred females in the USA did not avail of primary care. Furthermore, urgent care centers witness about a whopping eighty-nine million patient footfalls on an annual basis.
Bringing these individuals under the scope of telehealth is the need of the hour. When you begin providing telemedicine services, you are effectively making healthcare consumers more aware of you. As they are to receive text reminders for follow-up visits and may even get messages about electronic health consultation with you in due course of time, your urgent care unit is more likely to sustain them in the long-term.
People prefer convenient care more than anything else and for a vast majority, the ultimate in convenience is telemedicine. Though for a number of beneficiaries that simply translates to being able to book your clinic appointments on the internet instead of calling the office, for the rest, videoconferencing visits are to make the most impactful difference in what they used to perceive as convenient healthcare and for long. As long as a patient is consistent with a specific healthcare provider, a person can realize more improvements with respect to one’s health outcomes.
Consider the case of Suburban Wellness at Homer Glen that chose to integrate its services with the PatientMD Platform and by doing so, they are not only able to access the people who live anywhere in the Illinois or the USA for that matter but also witnessed a sharp reduction in patient turnover over a short period.
AFFORDABLE
Accessing urgent care might become an expensive proposition, particularly for those who are to arrive from the far-away places. At times, your most proximate urgent care is not serviced by a specific insurance plan, or additional tests are required at the office. For this reason, some might avoid seeing the doctor altogether, even if it is needed.
Telehealth can genuinely prove to be a cost-effective choice for the patients and as a consequence, the odds of seeking care when one requires it most are considerably high, so to speak. Whether a complete follow-up visit is required for a specific health condition, or if they just wish to inquire about something, the patients can access their care with reasonable ease by embracing telemedicine.
As mentioned earlier, after partnering with leading practitioners and healthcare companies in the USA, PatientMD is investing significantly in India to offer its state-of-the-art telemedicine services. As per a recent research study executed by the McKinsey Global Institute in the March of twenty-nineteen, she would be able to save up to ten billions of US dollars along with improving care for those who stay in remote locations and providing the poor with better care, if three to four of every in-person outpatient visits could get suitably replaced by the telemedicine.
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