Top Four Mistakes Providers Make with their Virtual Care Programs
As we continue to solve the age-old problems in healthcare with new and exciting technologies, it’s important to be pragmatic about your programs.
Not all solutions are made equal, and many made with the best intentions end up falling short in implementation. Thus, leaving you wondering if it was the virtual care program, the patient, or the provider?
How is it that some virtual care and remote patient monitoring (RPM) programs fail to achieve their promised benefits while others succeed?
In today’s blog we are going to be discussing the common mistakes healthcare providers make in their virtual care programs that obstruct the promises of digital health.
1. Failure to understand the complexity of integrations
Praised for its patient and clinical benefits - virtual care, and RPM remains one of the largest opportunities in Health IT today. Yet, there are many hurdles to overcome between the tangible benefits and a program’s inception that many in effect fail before they start. Some common obstacles we have helped our partners overcome are:
The successful connection of peripheral monitoring devices
Various IoT sensors, their connection type(s) and connection with your platform
Interoperability between the Virtual Care solution and the EHR
The devices themselves and the platform(s) used by the patient/clinician/healthcare system
Technology that improves productivity and does not deliver data overload - grinding productivity to a halt
Security compliance standards and data protection for your patients
Implementing a virtual care program can be described as a marathon and not a sprint. The best partner for you is one who can shield your clinicians from the complexity of digital integration, handling the administrative and IT burdens that happen behind the scenes. Thus, allowing you to leverage technology and remain focused on your patient’s care.
2. Lack of change management within organization
The main reason for implementing a virtual care program is to improve patient outcomes while saving clinicians' time. Therefore, it is crucial to understand that implementing digital solutions for population health is primarily a change management project.
Virtual care and remote monitoring programs result in the changing of care delivery workflows and escalation procedures. Thus, to ensure success there must be alignment from key stakeholders before these programs begin. Below you can find some common organizational change issues that we have seen crop up over the years:
How does the solution integrate and impact the workflow of the clinician?
How does it impact people’s roles?
Who is responsible for the remote patient monitoring program?
Do these procedures work across your entire organization/medical group?
How do you escalate patient requests via virtual care, who gets involved and how does your process change?
How are you going to get people to adopt the technology and remain compliant?
How can you mitigate the perception of ‘extra work’ for both the patient and the provider?
These types of questions represent the single-largest threat to the success of a digital health program and should be considered from the onset of the idea. To achieve the benefits of a virtual care or remote patient monitoring solution there must be unity on the above challenges.
3. Lack of explicit goals from the onset
It is impossible to know what success looks like if you don’t define and measure it. In the value-based care model, your success is measured by your patient outcomes. Therefore, it is important to understand what benefits you hope to achieve by implementing a virtual care or RPM program. Below we have listed some ideas you will need to consider:
What does success look like for your digital health program?
What change will be the most impactful for your health care system?
What problems are you solving with your solution?
Is your system built to measure against your success metrics?
Do you have consensus across your health system to the aforementioned objectives?
Without the ability to measure your success it is impossible to justify further investments in virtual care programs. Throughout the program measuring everything back to your key objective is crucial to the launch and continual success of a virtual care program.
4. Selecting the wrong partner for their program
Selecting an inadequate partner for your solution is a surefire way to have issues both today and into the future for your digital health program. Experience is everything with virtual care, with many vendors over promising and under delivering. You must be diligent when evaluating vendors and ensure you select the right partner for your program.
Mozzaz has a proven track record of producing industry leading virtual care and remote patient monitoring solutions that improve the access to care for your patients, drive better population health outcomes and help you manage the costs associated with your most at-risk population groups.
Our platform includes the innovative Adaptive Intervention Modeler (AIM™) which allows healthcare organizations to drive data-driven actions with rule-based content and smart alerts. This unique digital health technology enables patient-centric solutions for even the most complex care populations, driving continuous engagement and better patient outcomes.
If you are interested in exploring what a virtual care or remote patient monitoring solution would look like for your organization, contact us today.
