Can Telemedicine Increase Your Practice’s Profitability?

Enabling you to see more patients

Keeping schedules full is essential to running a profitable business. Missed appointments not only create a drain on profitability for practices, they also diminish patient outcomes.

Telemedicine enables you to see more patients by:

• Reducing no-shows or late cancellations
• Increasing your visibility and reach
• Enabling you to see patients from a wider geographical area
• Reducing waiting times
• Increasing patient satisfaction and loyalty
• Maintaining relationships with clients who may be away at college or temporarily residing in a different location
• Recruiting or retaining patients who face challenges travelling to your clinic
• Allowing you to fill vacant time slots with on-demand telemedicine consultations
• Improving access beyond normal clinic hours

Creating new revenue streams

Apart from increasing your patient base, telemedicine can increase revenue streams by:

• Providing follow-up calls via teleconsultation, rather than telephone, enabling you to claim for these interactions, as most insurers do not offer reimbursement for telephone calls
• Providing a special service to patients happy to pay for the convenience of telemedicine appointments with their regular physician during evenings and weekends
• Expanding specialties and services offered since providers can deliver telemedicine consultations from any location

   

Providing efficiency savings

Telemedicine practice enables efficiency savings by:

• Allowing patients to book and manage their own appointments
• Streamlining workflows 
• Using clinical resources and staff time more efficiently
• Minimising paperwork and administration costs by integrating teleconsultations within your patient management system, with fully digitised records 
• Expanding your hours with reduced costs by working from home
• Reducing clinic overheads
• Enabling you to grow your practice without additional premises or infrastructure

   

Differentiating you from your competitors

In changing times, practices that thrive and prosper are those which adapt and embrace new ways of providing quality care. An American healthcare consumer survey found that 20 percent  of patients would switch to another primary care provider (PCP) offering telehealth visits, if this option was not available with their current provider. Willingness to switch to doctors offering teleconsultations rose to 26 percent for 18-34 year olds and 34 percent for parents of children under 18.

Telemedicine also enables you to provide a higher quality of care by:

• Improving continuity of care
• Increasing patient engagement 
• Improving monitoring and management for chronic diseases
• Optimising follow-up and patient compliance

Does introducing telemedicine to your practice make financial sense?

The start-up costs involved can be recuperated by increased efficiencies, additional revenue streams and the potential to expand your practice. Over the longer term, a well-run telemedicine practice will offer a good return on your investment.