The obvious benefits of offering telemedicine visits are keeping patients out of your practice waiting room, reducing exposure for your staff, and being accessible to low-mobility patients. We've covered how telehealth moves your practice forward and prepares you to go remote if needed. Now, we want to shine a light on a few more opportunities that telehealth opens your practice and your individual OD career up to.
Benefits of Telehealth You Might Not Have Considered
Enabling Remote Access to Your Dispensary
Conversion from patient to optical dispensary customer is easier when it's all from the comfort of your home. There are practices installing walk-up windows to pickup dispensary products, but that's just the first step. If you start scaling your telehealth visits, you can easily add options for virtual dispensary browsing. Set up video calls with opticians and patients for an at-home "personal shopper" experience. More than anything, your patients will have easier access to ecommerce experience if they're already on a telehealth call.
Paving the Way for AI
Although your expertise and interpretation as an optometrist are invaluable and irreplaceable, there are a few parts of your telehealth workflow that automation can handle after you've input a treatment code. Now, there are AI apps that can speed up the pre-exam questionnaires, implement bots to push progressive questions onto patients with a more complex health history, and identify candidates for glaucoma screenings before they even see the OD. These aren't as easily implemented without the digital infrastructure for telemedicine.
Keeping Loyal Patients
Another benefit of telemedicine is that you don't have to lose patients that have been seeing you for years just because they are moving to another state, traveling for work, or leaving for college. If you've established a relationship of trust, you can offer telemedicine visits for questions, concerns, and check-ins. Keeping up the relationship is important if they're eventually going to return to your city, because we all know that it's more difficult to gain new patients that will return than it is to keep existing ones.
