Top 10 Tips for Making Telehealth work: A Physician Perspective — Michael Rodriguez MD, Fairfax Family Practice Centers

Need practical tips on how to set up and deploy telemedicine for your clinic or practice? Here are the top 10 tips for making telehealth work from a physician perspective.

Dr. Rodriguez shares his first hand experiences of putting together the processes and technology needed to provide telemedicine to his patients. From patient education to choosing telemedicine equipment to getting reimbursed, we get down to the nuts and bolts of implementing telemedicine services from a working physician’s point of view.

Slides: 

Highlights:

Dr. Rodriguez’s top 10 list as summarized in mHealthIntelligence:

  1. Know your goals up front – what do you want to accomplish with telemedicine?
  2. Know what your patients want. “Patients are pretty savvy and you really have to study them,” he points out.
  3. Identify your workflow – “your most precious resource” – and create a platform that integrates with that workflow, rather than supplementing, replacing or interrupting it.
  4. Choose a platform. Make sure it’s EHR-agnostic and scalable, and it meets your needs, rather than giving you something that you have to adjust to.
  5. Get good legal advice.
  6. Keep things simple, especially for the patients.
  7. Let gravity be your guide – if patients are doing too many different things to meet with you online, they’ll end up dropping things. You’re not giving them what they want, and they won’t be satisfied. They might even go somewhere else.
  8. Engage your staff and make sure they’re on board. “The biggest tool you have,” he says, “is to have your own folks excited.”
  9. Throw patients a lifeline – make sure that initial point of online contact is very easy.
  10. Make sure your patients are active in their own care.

 

About the Speaker

dr-michael-rodriguez-webinar
Dr. K. Michael Rodriguez – practicing family physician and the Vice President of the Fairfax Family Practice Centers board of directors.
Dr. Rodrigues received his medical degree from Temple University School of Medicine and completed his residency at the Medical College of Virginia/Virginia Commonwealth University where he served as Chief Administrative Resident. He is also a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Electrical Engineering.
Before becoming a physician he worked several years as an electrical engineer where he patented his work on RF identification technology and received the George Westinghouse Innovation Award. He is also an award winning medical columnist with a special interest in the use of medical technology. He lives in Northern Virginia and is an aviation enthusiast and active private pilot.

Comments ( 2 )
  • admin
    Brian McLean says:

    The video was a good introduction, but I would like to have seen something about how he make notes on the visits. I assume that is not part of Vsee. He must use another system for record keeping and notes and he must be able to see it at the time of the televisit.

  • admin
    anne says:

    Thanks for your feedback, Brian. We have many clients that use their EMR system side by side with VSee during a video visit. AthenaHealth is popular with many physicians. Depending on your needs, VSee also offers a light EMR for note-taking. We have note templates for certain specialties; we also have the ability to create a custom note template for your VSee Clinic. We find providers tend to prefer our notes because they are more streamlined. Notes can also be exported and uploaded to your EMR if necessary. Here is a demo video of an Enterprise VSee Clinic solution. Provider notes mentioned at around minute 9:40

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