A Patient Experience with Telemedicine

I’ve had the pleasure of a recent experience with three different telemedicine visits and I wanted to share what I learned from those as a patient, as a consumer of ehealth. My first visit was with my orthopeadic surgeon who was using an off the shelf video conferencing tool. My second visit was with another surgeon using a standard telemedicine platform. And finally my third visit was with an urgent care doc in a box who was also using a different standard telemedicine platform and app.

So, what did I learn from this:

• It’s not the tool that matters so much from a patient experience standpoint.
• It is the workflow and process around the tool that makes the patient experience a positive one.
• It is the ability of the physician office staff (all the physicians were great) to be comfortable with the technology and be able to interact and put in place processes that make the visit seamless and efficient that is critical to an engaging experience.
• All telemed visits were more personable and more “real” than in person visits. The visits were efficient and I felt I had wonderful quality time with my physicians – they were so focused on me and weren’t so many distractions as in an office visit with staff coming in and out.
• There weren’t hours of down time that an in office visit takes – driving to and fro, waiting to be seen, etc.

Bottom line – telemedicine visits should continue to be the norm unless an in-office visit is required for direct hands on care of some time (xray, blood work, assessment, etc.). while all visits were great, my most favorite experience was with my orthopeadic surgeon – tool worked great, the workflow and process wrapped around it was perfection, the staff I interacted with, in addition to my surgeon, were comfortable with the technology and the workflow and they all were so engaging and just so wonderful!