Knowledge Knugget: Define Telehealth - What It Means to Me

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Welcome to this week’s healthcare Knowledge Knugget! As a part of “The Executive Innovation Show” podcast, we’re bringing you the hot topics, including answering questions that we receive each week, game-changing ideas, best telehealth practices, and tips. During today’s topic, Carrie Chitsey talks about what telehealth means to her.

What Telehealth Means to Me
To get started, I'm going to talk about what I see when I look at telehealth and why it’s truly meaningful to me.. Also, I’m going to give some specific use cases as to how telehealth has helped me, and how it can help others, as well as why I started a telehealth company in the first place. To me, telehealth means convenience. It means better patient outcomes. And most importantly, it means an overall better caregiver experience. 

Telehealth Simplifies the Experience for Caregivers and Chronic Care Patients
Having gone through the hospice and skilled nursing facilities experience as the primary caregiver for my grandmother, telehealth is what enabled me to go to work most of the days. Rather than having to go physically to a nursing home or a long-term care facility when a clinician would call and report complications that were going on with my grandmother, telehealth was the answer. 

When you look at Gen X caregivers that are making these hospital and provider decisions, we are looking at telehealth as a time saver for us. This provides a way to get better patient outcomes with more outreach when we're able to make healthcare decisions. 

Telehealth Reduces No Shows and Improves the Patient Care Experience
The second use case I want to talk about is in regard to mental health. When we look at youth and senior mental health, which are kind of the bookends of mental health, there still is a huge opportunity to use telehealth to reach these segments. For instance, if I look at my own son who sees a therapist via telehealth, and still did pre-COVID, it serves as that checkpoint for him every week. Whether he's in his room videoing with the therapist or talking to a physical appointment, telehealth makes it easy.. And as a result, that no show rate reduces. So if our week is really crazy, or we're traveling, my son is still able to, regardless of where we are, shut the door, get on video, and have that mental health appointment.

And the same goes for seniors as it does with the youth population. As we're looking at these senior facilities, we see a sense of isolation. So telehealth may be the only outside interaction that they have for that week, whether it's using video to talk to a therapist, to talk to family members or caregivers, and get that face-to-face emotional connection. So, in essence, that's what telehealth means to me. 

Filled with insightful information, “The Driving Forces of Telehealth Adoption During COVID” infographic is now ready for download. Listen to the healthcare podcasts where we talk about all the use cases for telehealth. Subscribe to the podcast and rate us! Have a Knowledge Knugget idea? Reach out and submit today.