The Ultimate Guide to Telehealth Solutions

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Telehealth Utilization

Telemedicine, or telehealth, is a new era of digital healthcare ushered in by technology, allowing medical professionals to treat their patients regardless of the distance between them.

Noticeable trends that drove healthcare during this period include disruptive technologies such as: 

• Digital therapeutics for mental health and sleep issues
• Telepsychiatry to address mental health concerns
• Mobile clinics
• Decentralised clinical trials
• Virtual care for concerns from vascular diseases to mental health
• Real-world outcome analytics
• Patient-education-driven services
• On-demand healthcare worker staffing platforms., etc.

While the COVID-19 outbreak shed light on the existing gaps in healthcare, it was also responsible for one of the steepest evolutions in digital healthcare – telemedicine.

The lack of information about the COVID-19 virus and its effects also increased the demand for professional consultation from home, leading to a surge in online doctor consultations for even the most routine symptoms. Telemedicine app development was a crucial resource during this period to control the spread of this life-threatening disease through monitoring of patients, early detection, and prompt management of infected patients.

While there were basal levels of telemedicine available before the pandemic, it took a lot of “distance,” to speak, to push this technology to the forefront. To put this into perspective, April 2020 recorded a 78x higher utilisation of telemedicine than February 2020. Although this steep curve has steadied since then, 2021 still recorded that telehealth use has increased by 38x.

Quality Outcomes for Telehealth Solutions

Healthcare, as a whole, has primarily been plagued by three major issues – quality, accessibility, and affordability. Incidentally, these are the primary avenues on which telemedicine thrives.

• Doctors no longer have to worry about travel expenses, time, or physical barriers but can cater to a larger population, irrespective of location, socio-economic background, or disease.
•  With quality practitioners at their fingertips, patients and their caretakers no longer have to travel from clinic to clinic to reach specialists, as they can do so in the comforts of their homes. This has also significantly reduced the risk of self-medication and severity due to delayed diagnosis.
• The veil of added privacy provided by telemedicine allows people to seek treatment for concerns they would otherwise ignore actively. This is solidified by the fact that online consultations have seen a 50% rise in specialities like psychiatry and a 30% in substance abuse treatment due to the added privacy offered. Additionally, they have significantly increased mental health patients’ retention rates.
• Telehealth solutions provide the easiest screening methods – which can come in handy during pandemics like COVID-19. This not only reduces infection rates but also reduces the burden on healthcare infrastructure.

While we believe that these might just be some aspects that facilitate the Healthcare experience, researchers have gone ahead and validated that the quality of a teleconsultation is not inferior to the quality of a face-to-face visit. 

Challenges of building telehealth solutions

The post-pandemic future of Telehealth promises to explore a renewed quality in Standard of Care. This also allows space for expansion of other verticals, providing a holistic experience to the patient.

Imagine a single user interface leading you through your journey from symptom-based research to achieving the final medicines at home. However, telehealth solutions still have miles to go and acres to conquer.

a) Data Encryption

b) HIPAA Compliance

c) EMR integration for overall patient care

d) Physician user experience

 a) Data Encryption 

A lack of a centralised pipeline for patient data can be a hurdle in delivering optimal diagnoses and prognoses for patients. And even if the data is available, data security poses a challenge yet to be addressed. Data encryption in the health industry is vital. The medical data is translated into a system that makes it difficult to decrypt by unauthorised persons. If left unencrypted, patient data is no longer confidential – posing a massive breach of privacy. Therefore, establishing a solution that protects this data from potential attacks like phishing scams, rogue employees, insider attachments, etc., while still allowing easy decryption is a challenge to be addressed.

 b) HIPAA Compliance

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was passed in 1996 to protect individual health information. Under HIPAA, organizations that handle protected health information (PHI) must comply with privacy and security requirements and may incur fines if they don’t. While these rules apply to any organization that handles PHI, telemedicine companies have unique concerns with HIPPA compliance. In order to keep their patients safe and ensure patient privacy, telehealth providers need to make sure they take the necessary steps to assure compliance with HIPAA regulations.

 c) EMR integration for overall patient care

EMR integration solutions unify all clinical content, including images, photos, reports, and other medical paraphernalia, to establish a complete electronic patient record. However, there is still a lack of a central pipeline that combines all the data of a patient – including medical history, patient history and the data collected by medical devices – including wearable tech.

 d) Physician user experience

Since tech solutions are typically built by outsiders, so to speak, who usually have little to no experience working in medicine as a whole, the product that is developed may be clunky, and even difficult to use for physicians and healthcare staff that may not be as familiar with evolving tech. This holds true even for patients; therefore, a healthy user experience is a high priority for telemedicine apps.

Salient features of telemedicine

 a) PAAS video conferencing

PAAS, or platform as a service market, currently stands at US$ 4.3 billion. Market surveys conducted by Persistence Market Research project a 3X rise in valuation by the end of the decade. PAAS became a vital part of global businesses in the pandemic era. Since video conferencing makes the interaction between the patient and the doctor possible, it is viewed as the new version of home visits.

 b) Audio conferencing

Audio consultation allows patients to discuss urgent medical concerns over the phone without fear of privacy breaches.

 c) HIPAA compliance data storage

HIPAA compliance is key to medical data integrity. These privacy rules clarify how and when authorised persons can access a person’s health information.

 d) Text messaging 

Text messaging is an excellent tool for sending appointment reminders to patients. Appointments can be cancelled and rescheduled by text, thereby reducing no-show patients.

Technological requirements for better telehealth Solutions

Telemedicine cannot function properly without proper technological infrastructure and can be vital in patients’ overall treatment and care. The recent coronavirus pandemic underlined the need for better communication avenues through the internet.

Some of the basic requirements include:

  a) High-level integration design

Since a telemedicine app solution would need to integrate data from many places such as Electronic Health Records, Health Information Exchange, Laboratory Information systems, and even tech wearables that measure preliminary body parameters, it is necessary that the solution architecture is built on HLD, to ensure smooth deliveries and a healthy UI/UX experience.

 b) Preliminary HIPAA-compliant software architecture design

HIPAA compliance ensures the protection and security of protected health information. Therefore, solution architecture must be HIPAA compliant since its preliminary stage to avoid scalability issues if incorporated later.

 c) Tech stack selection

For a telemedicine app, it is imperative to have technologies that are able to work with various integrations, favourable UI/UX, and support different databases at the same time. The tech stack chosen should also have the ability to improve scalability and decrease development efforts.

 d) Identification of needed software licenses

For a telemedicine app, certain avenues are a given. One is live video chats, and others such as PM (Practice Management) software, which can dramatically increase the cost of MVP developments. Therefore, identification of the required software licenses during the development phase itself can help ideate a better strategy for app development.

The technology stacks to develop a telemedicine platform

The use of telemedicine has seen a surge across the globe. With growing revenue factoring into the equation, the stakes are high. Telemedicine app development is slated to see rapid growth. Therefore, the tech stacks chosen to develop a telemedicine platform should allow for such growth. For example: 

• Choosing backend frameworks or PHP that have ready-made integrations and powerful environments to automate tasks
• Choosing frontend frameworks like React Native that can decrease development efforts and improve scalability while allowing faster, smoother work that takes up much less cached space
• Choosing the correct APIs to improve communications from the app, such as push notifications or SMS/Phone verification, allows for a more intelligent user experience.
• Ensuring that the payment tech chosen for the app is available globally
• Choosing databases and clouds that suit the tech solution but are also flexible with integration with various platforms
• Enabling the translation of data through technologies like AI and NP to improve EHR integration

Why Silstone for building custom telehealth solutions?

Silstone Health is a full-service software development firm with expertise in value-based healthcare. They work with healthcare clinics and medical professionals to formulate software products with better clinical impact.

When developing a telemedicine solution, there are too many boxes to be ticked but not enough resources. Silstone offers a custom solution to healthcare startups looking to achieve the most within their budget. A prominent example of this can be their use of Agile Software Development Life Cycles, which allows the creation of a system with reactive feedback – enabling more efficient, aligned, and optimized software development. Agile SDLC is also collaborative, dynamic, and interactive – again helping time and resources by allowing for innovation in an industry like healthcare – where most variables are unknown.

What features does Silstone use to help you achieve desirable outcomes?

• Cloud architecture

Silstone uses its expertise to formulate healthcare solutions for the cloud to leverage benefits such as low starting expenses for deployment and a quicker process.

• Mobile hybrid applications

To get your solutions to the population, you need mobile support. Working with Native IOS, Native Android, React Native, and Flutter, Silstone makes the process seamless.

Bottomline

Times are evolving. Each day brings new challenges to the healthcare sector. Telehealth is not only a need in these troubling times but a necessity.