Healthcare today is influenced by three dynamics: outcomes, patient satisfaction, and reimbursement.  The Affordable Care Act drove healthcare to focus on outcomes to reduce the cost to administer care to a single patient.  Wellness has been part of insurance coverage for more than a decade now, and is understood by providers and consumers.  Outcome as a metric is relatively new.  Positive outcomes rely on patient satisfaction, requiring equal attention to the patient’s perception as well as the cure.

Patient satisfaction is hard to quantify.  Patient well-being is not just the physical sensation of pain relief, but a mental state.  Addressing both the physical and mental care of the patient has opened a new world of software applications with the purpose of empowering the patient to better communicate and follow a treatment and wellness plan.  Doctors, clinicians and behavioral health providers now have smart phone and social media tools that can link providers and their mutual patient.  These tools can connect patients to their provider’s nurse at any time and allow the providers to monitor clients’ mental states and track wellness all along the recovery period.  When a patient is feeling better and “knows” it, patient satisfaction improves and successful outcomes prevail.

A second market force, population dynamics, is having a dramatic impact on health care delivery.  While there is real progress being made on the technology and delivery side of health and wellness, the amount of qualified healthcare professionals per patient is on the decline, as aging “baby boomers” and opioid addicted patients overwhelm providers in many geographical areas.

One response to the provider shortage is to expand telehealth by allowing reimbursements for live video encounters via individual state legislative action.  While telehealth has been around in some form for decades, televideo for live provider-to-client encounters is now coming into its own.  Live video encounters not only ease the doctor shortage by allowing a provider to see more patients per hour; they create more satisfied patients.  In a recent survey reported by mHealthIntelligence.com, 20% of consumers would switch to a doctor that offered virtual office visits using live video.  Many patients would prefer a video encounter to an office visit.

Due to legislative action over the last three years, the number of states that now reimburse live video encounters from Medicaid has doubled.   With legislation pending in eight more states, telemedicine parity (insurance payments at the same rate as an in-office visit) has majority rule in 41 states.  These laws include guidelines for reimbursement by insurance companies, assuring a means to pay for televideo site to site and site to home video encounters.  Because of legislative action taken by the states to fund live video encounters, providers will rely more and more on video technology, and patient care will continue to improve even in the looming physician shortage.

To prepare for the demand for video streaming services, Arrendale Associates has partnered with other high tech companies to create powerful tools including video streaming, secure note taking on smart phones and EHR integration services.   Arrendale provides integration workflow from innovative software applications that connect patients to providers, monitor patient day to day wellness, and track a client’s mental status in real time.  Arrendale clinical documentation tools include speech to text conversion in the cloud and our smart phone app to narrate encounter notes while providers are “on the go”, working from multiple locations.  By the time providers return to their desk, their dictated notes are converted to text for more detailed, better and more efficient documentation. Arrendale’s tools can cut clinical documentation time dramatically.

Live video conferencing, now imbedded in Arrendale applications, is provided by industry innovators at 2MI Software. Live video encounters provide remote patients a level of care rivaling face-to-face encounters for many situations that would otherwise demand a visit. Video conferencing is included in Arrendale’s SpeakEZ+ application.  Arrendale’s Mobile+ smart phone application works with SpeakEZ+ to provide options for creating clinical notes.  Providers can dictate on their smart phone using the Mobile+ app and have the option of listening and typing the notes themselves into their EHR, or using cloud speech recognition to convert voice to text at the time of narration.  Once the voice is converted to text, Arrendale delivery software efficiently moves the note into your EHR or document management system. Greater workflow flexibility directly translates into more positive outcomes and satisfied patients.

Watch this 90 second video to learn more.

 

Try it for Yourself!

Delbert L. Arrendale, CEO

Arrendale Associates, Inc.

 

About Arrendale Associates, Inc.: AAI supplies comprehensive clinical documentation solutions to healthcare customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland and India.  Arrendale Associates, a Nuance reseller, has enhanced Nuance’s Dragon within Arrendale’s Speak-EZ+ application for greater productivity, voice file retention, HIPAA tracking, and workflow flexibility.

If you would like more information about this topic, contact Arrendale at (888) 300-6232 or email sales@aaita.com.