BEHAVIORAL HEALTH:
Guide to Making telehealth Shine
Online
Brought to you by Hungry Monster
Content and Design
Introduction
Telehealth usage has skyrocketed. So have patients’ expectations for their telehealth experience.
So the way in which you present your telehealth sessions on your website, on social media and elsewhere...matters. It matters now, and even more so in the near future.
Here we explain why and how to up your game online.
Practitioners are thinking anew about the clinical issues around a telehealth skill set and workflow. This post takes a look at how we best present and promote telehealth, on your website and elsewhere.
Astounding growth in telehealth usage
Fact
Telehealth has accelerated by an astounding 50-175 times during the COVID-19 pandemic.1 Both volume and demographics have drastically changed.
Fact
In the field of Behavioral Health – where it is sometimes called telepsychiatry 2 – usage of the tehad reached 96% of all sessions as of September, 2020. 3
Fact
Pre-pandemic, about 22 percent of U.S. consumers used telehealth, while over 80% percent were on board by October of 2020, according to Amwell. 4
What these changes mean for the near future may grab your attention.
What the Future Holds for Telehealth in Behavioral Health
A widespread ecosystem of “digital health,” including telehealth, is already on the horizon. Wearables, electronic monitoring, 5G wireless access to rural areas and much more are already in place or on the near horizon.
It is no exaggeration, as some say, to predict that digital health, with telehealth at its heart, seems poised to transform medicine. 5
Moreover, the present shortage of mental health professionals seems sure to impact the field. 6
Signs are that incentives and pressure for better efficiency in mental health will soon come from insurers, lawmakers, regulators, or referrers. This surely would include telepsychiatry and might follow the pattern of the $200M Federal Communications Commission 2020 Telehealth Program. 7
Big picture: a new centrality of what has been called “digital health,” or virtual care, with telehealth at its heart, seems poised to create a major shift in behavioral health practices. 8
6 ways to make telehealth shine online
Here are six ways to combine an effective digital presence with your telehealth service:
AT A GLANCE:
Prominently feature telehealth on website and social media
Reimagine telehealth as an integral part of your website
Prioritize training, socialize workflow
Make the session easy
Follow up
Resources and references
Give telehealth star billing on website and social media
A well-designed behavioral healthcare website welcomes patients to your telehealth offering, and to your practice as whole.
Telehealth needs to be prominently placed on your homepage above the fold for a start. If your practice is 100% telehealth right now, the site should state that.
We strongly suggest a dedicated telehealth page with clear, simple how-to instructions in plain English. Explainer videos are an interesting option.
On your website, Facebook page or other social media, your telehealth message needs to be clear and consistent.
It is this: telehealth is part of 21st century healthcare, a service you are happy to offer to your valued patients. It is not a second string solution.
Among its benefits: convenient, stigma-free and private access to patients. A proven way to connect with and treat children who may otherwise resist trips to the office.
Your telehealth page and website must be as well designed as your physical office. It should display ease-of-use and simplicity, along with an air of authority patients can trust.
Normalize the online healthcare experience
Your goal is to move away from telehealth as your sole, once-weekly online exercise. Instead, make digital communication continuous with patients, and engage them.
Outreach to patients may include:
Blog posts from your practice to help build trust, authority, and keep lines open. Over time they can drive patient attraction, retention, referrals, and return.
Events such as webinars or video chats maybe offered.
Direct email can be used to announce these events, provide resource information, describe new or enhanced services.
Patients may be engaged by allowing:
Online appointment-scheduling Appointment reminders
HIPAA-compliant communication using text or messaging
Prescription refill requests
Access to test results
Increasingly, consumers expect ongoing interaction with the services they depend on, notably including healthcare.
When patients are familiar and comfortable with connected care, they will become comfortable with the telehealth session, and the ground laid for better outcomes.
It bears mentioning that some patients may be open to incorporating wearables, such as the fitness watches which are quickly evolving into….
This does mean a commitment to virtual care as fundamental to your practice and its workflow. And while this may be accomplished incrementally, it will need to be an established goal.
Prioritize training, socialize workflow
Before launch, when onboarding new staff, make sure staff all stakeholders in your practice are familiar and comfortable with the workflow and technology. This goes for staff, financial and legal support, and vendors among others.
Example: how are data from telehealth sessions ported into your EHR? At launch, and for new patient-facing staff, consider practice sessions, as recommended by the AMA in its highly valuable Telehealth Implementation Playbook.
It may be useful to hire writers to create talking points for staff. Written case studies can paint a vivid picture of a typical telehealth session, both for internal staff and prospective patients.
A confident staff will make for a more confident and forthcoming patient.
Choose the technology
that fits
Since telehealth replaces person to person sessions, it impacts notes, reimbursement, treatment planning. Integrating the data from telehealth can be managed manually, or with most dedicated telehealth platforms, integrated into your EHR or practice management systems.
Dedicated telehealth platforms:
Many dedicated telehealth services may be fully integrated into EHR or EHM systems. Some boast free versions, such as the well-known doxy.me service. Thera-link caters to the solo to mid-size behavioral health practice. vSee states it is especially designed for areas of poor internet service.
Virtual therapy connect offers a different model, providing a maintenance-free platform for individual therapists and smaller clinics. It utilizes the VTConnect Enterprise Platform, used by large clinics and hospitals.
Many EHR and practice management systems incorporate their own telehealth feature. the small-practice-friendly simplepractice and the comprehensive Kareo platform.
If choosing a more comprehensive platform like these, look for:
A clean interface. Your opening screen should not look like the cockpit of a 757.
Ability for the patient to enter a virtual “waiting room” where they can launch the session, without links, codes, passwords, Patients click a link and wait to be admitted.
Digital intake for easy and touchless completion of intake and other forms.
Integration with your patient data. This means easy and automated flows of information into your EHR, EHM or Practice Management systems.
HIPAA- and GDPR-compliance as well as PIPEDA-compliance if in Canada.
Video features: look for a high-definition picture of at least HD quality. Look for a wide scope of view allowing for multiple patient participants such as other care partners, translators, parents or guardians.
The same functionality in a companion mobile app.
Use of common applications, Zoom, other
It is still very possible to create an effective telehealth workflow with a combination of commonly-used software. This can include Zoom or other video conferencing software along with other separate applications. Some practitioners find that this gives patients and staff immediate familiarity with the service.
Note that the HIPAA-compliant Zoom for Healthcare will mean significant additional charges compared to its consumer service.
Nonetheless, as of the middle of 2020, Zoom was the most used telehealth platform for individual and small practices. We have not found data for 2021 as yet.
In this approach, integration with your EMR or EHR would, of course, need to be manual.
Some practices lean to the personal oversight and accountability of manual input. For a small or individual practice this may make some sense.
It must be pointed out, however, that with the complex workflows specific to behavioral health, compliance issues, introducing a new manual piece must be done with care, and optimally with professional help.
Follow up
With surveys, phone calls, and exit interviews, find out what works and keep it. Find out what didn’t work and change or discard it.
Then use survey and outcomes data (within HIPAA guidelines of course) to reach out to potential partners and referrers.
Tracking your success can energize healthcare marketing, including on social media. Content Marketing is especially effective over the long haul.
Conclusion
Telehealth seems poised to become a central feature of healthcare delivery. While its future also depends on regulatory policy across state lines and other social and political factors, its tremendous growth and impact seems inevitable.
Telehealth, indeed may bode an important shift, integrating digital health, in behavioral health practice.
Even now, great website and social media content and design can support imaginative initiatives in your practice: attracting welcoming and onboarding new patients in new ways, blogging for patient retention, telehealth for peer and consultations and to support partnerships with adjacent fields (with IEP programs in schools, for example).
Time to see how your practice can best move into the 21st-century.
Hungry Monster Content and Design can provide unique and effective written and visual materials for both website, social media, and internal use.
Resources
1 McKinsey & Co., Telehealth: A quarter-trillion-dollar post-COVID-19 reality?
2 We use “telepsychiatry” to mean telehealth for specifically Behavioral Health usage. We do use the word “telehealth” here in what has become a vernacular: meaning any electronic and communications technologies supporting medical practitioners’ care of patients. This is the meaning that emerged commonly during the 2020-2021 COVID pandemic.
Other terms are in use in this relatively nascent field: “virtual care,“ “virtual mental health care,” and “telemedicine” with their wider meaning, roughly synonymous with “digital health.”
See the American Association of Family Physicians backgrounder on telemedicine for alternate definitions.
3 FierceHealthCare, Demand for Virtual Mental Health Care is Soaring. See also an October survey by behavioral health software company Tridiuum which discovered that 81% of behavioral health providers newly offered telehealth in only the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
4 Becker’s Hospital Review, Physicians’ Telehealth Usage Increased by 58% Since 2019, Survey Finds
5 An expansive look into the coming future of virtual care can be found in the FDA’s excellent “What is Digital Health?”
The Center for Connected Health Policy puts it this way: “[the sudden transformation of telehealth] has catapulted telehealth and its many benefits to the forefront of mainstream medicine.”
6 The Silent Shortage: How Immigration Can Address the Large and Growing Psychiatrist Shortage in the United States” New American Economy, October 2017. Also: Video: Leveraging Digital Health to Manage the Care Deficit and Address Revenue Challenges in the COVID Era
7 HealthIT Answers: FCC Seeks Public Input on Administering Round 2 of COVID-19 Telehealth Program.
HealthIT also reports that state lawmakers have introduced about 300 bills aimed at expanding access to telemedicine
8 The American Medical Association’s Telehealth Implementation Playbook is one of many resources which can can help think through the clinical issues in creating a telehealth skill set and workflow.