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Currently, health care providers are shifting to telemedicine solutions to extend care and attend to patients remotely. Due to the advancements in technology, telemedicine serves healthcare to provide quick and prompt treatments for patients from their homes. Since most vendors offer telemedicine software solutions, choosing the best platform for your facility might be overwhelming and challenging. Your telemedicine software should have the following features to enable you to do a confident decision-making process:
Document and image capture
Patients need to access a feature that can enable them to add their clinical documents and upload and capture photographs directly from the gallery of their devices during and before the consultation. Such files should be linked to the record of the patient. Similarly, doctors should easily upload documents during and before the consultation to efficiently serve their patients. They should also have the ability to update the documents uploaded.
Audio-visual enabled
The audio-visual feature can help to promote trust between patients and their doctors. Both parties can interact through audio and video conferencing while undertaking remote consultation. In this case, doctors can identify visible symptoms, and patients can effectively discuss their health complications in a manner they would have done in an in-person appointment. However, that implies the telemedicine software should be equipped with high-quality audio and video calls.
The software should also offer other critical features, including video recording, screen sharing, group calls, and after hours call service. In summation, healthcare providers need to strive to make virtual real-time medical consultations resemble in-person appointments.
Patient doctor profiles
Profiles can assist patients in maintaining their health-related records in one place. Apart from the basic information, including age, sex, and name, a profile can have the medical history, previous appointments, prescriptions, and insurance verification details. During a telemedicine session, physicians can have a more accurate diagnosis by requesting patients to share information. Similarly, doctor profiles enable them to manage personal availability and schedules for telemedicine sessions. The doctors’ profile can contain information such as name, experience, and specialization to assist patients in selecting the appropriate physicians for their remote medical consultation.
Integration with other e-health applications.
When the software synchronizes with other apps, gathered data can become more valuable since it can assist physicians in making more accurate diagnoses. In particular, the software should write and read medical data, including blood glucose, oxygen saturation, blood pressure, and temperature.
Allowing them to share such data with the primary healthcare providers enables them to monitor the patients’ conditions regularly. Also, the telehealth software should include an internal chat for medical experts to share their first-hand experiences with certain medical procedures.
E-prescription
A telehealth software needs to have an e-prescription feature to enable health care practitioners to design and electronically send prescriptions to patients after and during the consultation session. Also, the health care provider can include functionality that allows them to share the e-prescriptions of the patients with a list of pharmacies. Apart from facilitating process efficiency and automation, such a feature plays a critical role in patient safety. In particular, when physicians get a chance to prescribe medication through the application, they practically eliminate the risk of human errors. As a consequence, patients can be assured of receiving the appropriate medication with the correct dosage.
Payment gateway
Patients can easily pay for telemedicine services using the same application they used to communicate with their doctors with a payment gateway feature. Due to the automation of invoices, patients can make payments at any time and receive a more pleasant experience while they interact with health care experts. Also, using reputable payment systems, including PayPal, and Stripe, ensures that patients access secure payment processing and avoid losing their money to people who might want to con them. Further, payment gateway integration enhances the accuracy of money issues and minimizes the administrative burden associated with remote clinical services.
Alerts and reminders
In most cases, doctors might become busy such that they might fail to remember all their schedules. At the same time, patients might book a session in advance and forget about it when it is due. Therefore, medical institutions need to equip their telemedicine applications with alerts and reminders to ensure that users do not miss their sessions. Such features can assist patients and doctors in monitoring their appointments and significantly minimize experiencing no-shows.
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