Here are a few maintenance best practices to help you from an administration, clinical and technical perspective:
Evaluate your strategy regularly
Think about your target demographic and the services you offer on a regular basis. If your patients’ wants and needs are constantly changing, your strategy needs to, as well. Consider the ways you’re currently leveraging telemedicine technologies, and decide how you can make modifications. It is critical to look for modifications that will have a positive impact to all involved including not just the patient, but clinicians and administrative staff that support the program as well.
As your strategy adjusts, your goals will too. Have meetings with stakeholders on a regular basis – whether that’s bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly – to go over insights from collected data to discover ways to meet new goals. Assess the patient and clinician experience over telehealth as well as the workflow from both a clinical and administrative perspective.
Conduct quarterly training
Each one of your staff members needs to know the system intimately. New employees and those familiar with the system will need on-going structured training. To achieve the right level of comfort, confidence and expertise, conduct training on a quarterly basis or more if needed.
“Create simple, clear instructions for the training,” Ross Hurd, CIO of Lake Chelan Community Hospital, told Becker’s Hospital Review. “When the clinical staff is given time to practice, later issues are more resolvable. Real-time in the hospital is time sensitive so avoiding mistakes is crucial. I also recommend training without the IT staff present. They will not be there in real time. It is best to train in as real of situations as possible.”
Monitor the system routinely
Assign qualified IT staff members the responsibility to maintain and service the system on a routine basis to ensure it’s always running as it should. These individuals should complete any technical training your telehealth vendor provides, so you have immediate inside access to support when needed. Alternatively, many telehealth vendors offer this technical monitoring and support as a service as well.
Reach out to your vendor in times of need
There may be instances down the road when a specific function needs attention and your service staff members are not sure how to take care of it. As the world’s leading supplier of telemedicine solutions, AMD Global Telemedicine provides the assistance you need to properly maintain your telehealth processes. This support is the best way to maximize telemedicine and provide quality care to your patients.
For more information on telemedicine maintenance and implementation, contact us today.
