5 Digital Health Tools Every Practice Should be Using

 

Digital health is rapidly transforming the healthcare space, with the potential to broaden access, reduce costs, improve quality and provide a more personalized healthcare experience for patients. Medical practices planning to keep up with future patient requests and expectations will need to invest in visual health solutions, interactive medical media, and related digital health tools.

Making a meaningful impact on patient outcomes and healthcare system inefficiencies starts with these five technologies.

Online & Mobile Access

Digital patient portals are quickly shifting away from being a differentiator between practices and moving into a musthave interactive health tool. Patients expect to be able to make or change appointments digitally, along with requesting refills for their prescription, accessing medical information, and engaging in two-way communication with practice staff or even the doctor.

As technologies improve, apps and web-based applications will expand beyond the streamlining of administrative tasks and delve deeper into the delivery of health solutions and the facilitation of patients being able to better manage and track health and wellness-related activities.

Telemedicine with Secure Audiovisual Connectivity

Demand for telemedicine and virtual appointments is exploding – and not only due to pandemic related acceleration. Virtual medicine gives patients greater choice of physicians, as they are no longer bound by geographic constraints. Telemedicine reaches into rural or otherwise underserved communities. It reduces costs, eliminates the need to miss work, and allows patients to skip the time waste of traveling to the office and sitting patiently in a crowded waiting room.

Not every appointment can be conducted over a secure audiovisual application, but many can, and the number of visits that can be adequately served remotely is growing.

Virtual medicine offers benefits to the provider, including improved practice efficiency and boosted revenue from seeing more patients per day. Telemedicine also makes it easier to track and bill follow-up calls.

Interactive Medical Media

Interactive medical media elevates patient education to new heights, engaging audiences in such a way to encourage patients to take a more active and interactive role in their healthcare journey. Interactive medical media goes beyond static video productions to drive information retention and help patients walk away with a better understanding of the message their healthcare provider is working to convey.

Interactive visual medical solutions empower patients, putting them into a scenario where they can become truly knowledgeable regarding their current health and long-term potential.

Potential applications of visual medical solutions include:

• • Virtual tours of labs, treatment rooms and other facilities available at the hospital or practice
  • Improved medical staff training and collaboration
  • Reduced medical anxiety through a more relaxed and informed patient experience
  • Sharing of diagnostic imaging for advanced patient education
  • Interactive self-learning portals for patients
  • Engaging awareness campaigns for public health issues

Digital Monitoring

As new remote diagnostic technologies hit the market, doctors are able to expand their digital monitoring capabilities. From the heart to the lung to the brain, scanning patients’ vital body systems without needing to come into office will improve outcomes through early detection and smarter decision making, with a larger database of patient data to work from.