Telemedicine Delivers ‘Healing at a Distance’

… plug in — to improve and standardize processes, and to shape the direction in which telemedicine is headed.”

OneNeck IT’s Jeff Budge

With medicine, Budge stresses, decisions have to be made very quickly, which determine a very specific set of actions. Because of this, it’s vital that there be the right processes in place from the get-go, a service desk for issue management and proper education with regard to HIPAA regulation compliance.

There’s also the tiny, wee issue of security.

“A lot of small practices or individual doctors who are starting to either subscribe to these telemedicine services or are trying to implement a telemedicine platform for themselves, are counting on the software vendor, the provider of the telemedicine system, to have proper and all-encompassing security in place,” says Budge. “In a lot of cases, they may be unfamiliar with what security even means or entails, not to mention how to deploy and use it.”

Boom. Dynamic opportunity for providers. How will a practice know if it’s fully compliant beyond an audit? Providers can perform assessments, help set a path, prioritize activities and policies, processing updates, and so on.

“It’s up to MSPs to help practices and practitioners understand where their security exposures are, where their risks are, and how to mitigate those and set their path forward,” adds Budge.

Telemedicine still has a lot of growing to do and there are certainly remaining issues to address and iron out, as providers well know with health-care technology and advancements. But this healing solution is already making a positive impact on lives and shows no signs of slowing down.