It’s the last game of the season. The floodlights turn on – illuminating the crisp autumn sky and revealing the compact emerald turf. As you sit on the locker room bench, you hear the other high school students stamping their feet on the metal bleachers in anticipation. You stand up and rush through the tunnel, the nervous euphoria that was in your stomach now an all-encompassing focus on the game.

The whistle blows, you get the ball, your opponent comes directly for you. You shimmy to the left. They saw it coming. BAM! You’re on the ground. Waves of pain circulate from your thumb. Your coach tells you to wrap it. Later, when you take the bandage off, your thumb is more swollen than it had been before. The minute you see the doctor in the emergency room, they look at it and ask why you wrapped up your hand for a broken bone.

The doctor was able to determine how to treat the injury in seconds by simply looking at the hand. If the coach had access to a telehealth solution, a doctor could have determined what to do quickly and accurately. Utilizing telehealth for sports is just one application for this increasingly useful technology.

The healthcare industry is undergoing dramatic efforts to improve the delivery of care. Lots of changes have already occurred that have expanded access to quality care. Now, the challenge is to shift the conversation to focus on optimizing health that emphasizes patient-centered care.

A recent report by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) determined consumers should remain at the center of care to keep them engaged and healthy. CMS describes an optimal patient-provider relationship as one that “[gives] consumers access to their records, [enabling] them to be more active participants in their care, making care more person-centered.”

Telehealth provides convenient care for patients and offers healthcare professionals a more efficient and effective way to treat them.

July 1996. It’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit with a broken air conditioner in your car. Work starts in five minutes, and you slam on the breaks two inches away from the rusting Nissan Maxima in front of you. 

You can feel the sweat dripping down your forehead as you reach for the eject button on the tape player and feel an insatiable need to scratch your forearm. You scratch and scratch and turn your arm over. There’s a bumpy red rash running half the length of your arm. You won’t be able to see the doctor until Friday. It looks like poison ivy, but who knows?

Today, the most pressing problem you may have in this situation is finding the best time that works to schedule a TeleVisit with a healthcare professional.

How do you provide care to underserved patients who have difficulty getting to the office? This was the challenge we were trying to solve at The Clark Clinic. Some of our patients don’t have access to a vehicle or are physically restricted and unable to travel far. But, as most of our community is underserved, we needed to collectively identify a solution to ensure we can serve all our patients.

Telemedicine is transforming healthcare by making optimal use of healthcare resources. By providing an in-office experience remotely, healow TeleVisits lets providers deliver the same high-quality medicine while letting patients experience the comfort and convenience of being at home or on the road. Not every medical encounter requires a physical office visit, and TeleVisits are ideal for pre-op consultations, quick post-op checkups, and many routine encounters. Secure and fully integrated into the eClinicalWorks EHR, TeleVisits are making care easier and more efficient.

Fifteen years ago, healthcare was lagging behind other industries when it came to high-tech innovation and changing Americans’ perception of “the way things had to be done.” At that time, having your health records available electronically was just starting to resonate. Now that the majority of physicians use electronic health records (EHR), the industry is still innovating and at an even more rapid pace to bring consumer-facing health apps, wearables and telehealth to the market.

As talked about as patient engagement is today, there is still plenty of confusion around how to maximize it. Enterprise solutions such as EHRs and revenue cycle management streamline the healthcare process therefore simplifying the patient’s experience, and with telehealth, mobile and wearable devices, patients can experience a more personalized experience. My son uses his mobile phone and a QR code to buy coffee, why not also use the same technology to check-in at his doctor’s office?