The American Medical Association updated Digital Health Implementation Playbook Series offers tips and best practices for making the most of virtual consult technologies. It has put together this new guide to help providers implement real-time virtual visits between clinicians and patients.
Why It Matters
This comes as telehealth adoption is increasing by leaps amid the coronavirus pandemic. Use of virtual care technologies had already doubled between 2016 to 2019, and since the COVID-19 public health emergency, more and more overtaxed health
systems have been availing themselves of tools that enable care to be delivered remotely, keeping patients and healthcare professionals away from potential infection. AMA’s playbook series offers 12-step processes to help with rollouts of various digital health tools. With regard to telehealth specifically, the guide highlights the importances of identifying compelling use cases, putting together teams comprising the right stakeholders, key metrics to define success, how to assess and contract with vendors and more.
Subsequent steps delve into details of telehealth program implementation: designing workflows, change management for care teams and scaling up.
AMA notes that the telehealth playbook series can be used in conjunction with its guide for remote patient monitoring, as more and more providers get used to the idea of using devices, and sensors to capture and record patient generated health data.