Up-leveling patient care with team collaboration technology

In healthcare today, patients are demanding easier and faster access to the care they seek. But current statistics show that when a patient schedules an appointment, the wait time is up to 3+ weeks. This, and other factors result in missed appointments with a cancellation rate at 15-30% in the outpatient setting¹. With this many cancellations, many healthcare providers miss opportunities to fill schedules with other patients who may be available or have an appointment booked further out. Enter Luma Health. And enter team collaboration tool. Connecting Patients to their Health Systems Luma Health is  a company founded to connect patients with their healthcare providers in an easy, mobile-friendly way. The Luma Health Patient Engagement platform gives healthcare systems and providers a solution to interact with their patients along their entire care journey from when they call to schedule an appointment to after appointment follow-ups and reminders about health tips and follow-up care. Recently, Luma Health has created a telehealth bot integrated with Cisco Webex Teams, Cisco’s team collaboration tool. Webex Teams ensures secure work spaces where people/teams can work, message, file share, white board, and host video conferencing calls. For Luma Health, this integration means they can set up private “room” within Webex Teams so that doctors can video conference their patients and assess them as they would if they were sitting in the doctor’s office. Additionally, Webex Teams is embedded inside the portal, so doctor’s don’t have to navigate between their Luma Health platform and the Webex Teams application. Let’s talk about that more… This Luma Health bot/Webex Teams integration comes most into play in a couple scenarios:

• When a patient who is eligible to meet via telehealth (determined by their appointment type/existing diagnosis), pre-schedules an appointment.
• When factors get in the way of a patient making it to a healthcare center (i.e. lack of transportation to get to the appointment-helping reach underserved communities who may not otherwise have good access to health care).

For the patient, the telehealth meeting is easy and painless. The meeting is initiated from the provider while a meeting link is sent to the patient as a text message. No downloads are needed from the patient’s side. Once the meeting is completed, the room is deleted and the recording is exported and stored in the patient records. Benefits from the integration Benefits are seen for both the providers and the patients. Not only are healthcare providers able to see more patients, patients that may cancel in-person appointments due to time constraints/lack of transportation can meet with their doctors/providers over Webex Teams video calling. This increases revenue for providers and flexibility for patients, while still maintaining a personal patient/doctor relationship. Explore ways you can use Webex Teams in your business and start a 30 day free trial: here.

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  ^1:Source: Physician Appointment Wait Times and Medicaid and Medicare Acceptance Rates, Merritt Hawkins, 2014; Harmony Healthcare IT, 2014; How Patients Want to Communicate with Their Physician, 2014.