EHR with Telemedicine

Do you need an EHR with the telemedicine feature? If you are looking for your existing EHR integration with telehealth or would like to understand how to add telemedicine to your practice let’s consider using WebRTC technology in healthcare as one of the best options available for you.

We create/customize and implement HIPAA/GDPR-compliant EMR/EHR applications and other healthcare software solutions like telehealth for healthcare businesses from the USA, Canada, Israel, the UK, and other European countries. We have already grown companies just like yours.
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The recent public health emergency resulting from COVID-19 has accelerated the implementation of healthcare service delivery through telehealth. Clinicians can now provide more services to beneficiaries via telehealth. As you probably know, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has expanded access to Medicare telehealth services.

Features of Telemedicine

Enrich your healthcare application with real-time communications adding Telehealth features.

E-visits and medical consultations. The main idea of telehealth is to connect patients and physicians around the world quickly and securely through live video. This enables two-way, face-to-face interactions on a computer or mobile device with high-quality video and audio. 

Secured communication can be held by a wired or wireless Internet connection. 

Some solutions also allow screen sharing and multiway video so 3rd parties (such as caregivers or translators) can also participate in a virtual consultation. All the additional attendees are added by the doctor.

Define session time slots. Choose how long your telemedicine consultations should last. Define a suitable time slot to schedule the meeting with the patients.

Manage your time.In the case of contingencies, сonfirm, cancel, or re-schedule telemedicine appointments to suit your availability and manage your time effectively

Reduce No-Shows. Lower no-shows by confirming telemedicine appointments and sending notifications about the upcoming telemedicine sessions. 

Define pricing. You have the opportunity to price and charge patients (or keep it free) for telemedicine sessions. Moreover, while hosting a webinar you can set the fee for joining the meeting.

Online payments.You can collect all the payments for your telehealth sessions in advance to confirm participation.

Online billing.Generate bills for video consultations to track the revenue generated for telemedicine services and provide complete financial management of your practice.

We stand for providing the highest quality of healthcare services delivered while using telemedicine features. That’s why we considered the opportunity for the providers to access patients’ health records during video sessions to help with the diagnosis. All the recordings are available for the doctors to clarify the assignments in the future.

Consultation Notes. Create notes during your sessions with patients in order not to lose goals, medications prescribed, invoices, follow up appointments, or care plans you may have discussed.

ePrescriptions.You will be able to prescribe the medications during your telemedicine sessions and send the prescriptions by email or with a paper-printed letter to patients without the need for them to visit the practice.

Consultation summary. Share a summary via email with patients, including key aspects discussed during your session, for better medication adherence.

Adding telemedicine features can improve your abilities in following up with the visitors on their progress.

Patient-initiated. Patients can book follow-up appointments to their clinic visits or online consultations and consult with you via video sessions. This will definitely save the providers’ time compared with written communication. 

Moreover, the patients can clearly see the type of appointment while checking their schedule so that they can plan their visits or video calls.

Provider-initiated. Book follow-up telemedicine sessions for patients who may not be able to visit you at your clinic.

Text consultations. This particular feature allows doctors to exchange text-based messages with patients in real-time before, during, or after an appointment. These messages are secure and HIPAA compliant to ensure your practice is following all regulations.

Adapting an existing WebRTC Solution to the Current EHR/EMR System

Web Real-Time Communication saves your time if you need the telehealth functionality as soon as possible. Its mission is to "enable rich, high-quality RTC (real-time communications) applications to be developed for the browser, mobile platforms, and IoT devices, and allow them all to communicate via a common set of protocols".

Advantages of WebRTC

1. WebRTC ensures rapid implementation of the audio/video conferencing features without hiring a huge team.
2. You can customize the interface of your telehealth app to align with the interface of your existing EHR/EMR system.
3. You don’t need to redevelop your existing system, as only one new module with an intuitive user-friendly interface would be added.
4. WebRTC allows audio and video streams to work inside web pages by allowing direct peer-to-peer (P2P) communication, eliminating the need to install plugins or download native apps. 
5. The technology is available on all modern browsers as well as on native clients for all major platforms.

WebRTC provides web browsers and mobile applications with real-time communication via simple application programming interfaces (APIs). 

In our case WebRTC is interesting as a means to connect existing communication providers to the EHR/EMR system through API, creating a time- and cost-saving solution for telehealth services. 

This way of implementing telehealth features on the one hand ensures you get a reliable and secure communication channel and on the other hand doesn’t demand any significant changes in your current system. 

The only condition to perform such integration is the presence of an open API in the customer’s EHR, but even the absence of it can be fixed by developing a special add-on.

How to Choose the Best WebRTC Provider

To take all the advantages of this method, you must choose the WebRTC provider carefully to prevent expensive refactoring and/or re-architecting when the load on your WebRTC solution grows.

All the major WebRTC platform providers want to make it easy to start using their product. This means it is free for the initial low volume. As the implementations scale-up in volume or the use-case goes beyond minimal functionality, the costs go up as well and for very high volumes, they charge a lower pay-as-you-go rate.

The major differences among providers often come down to which facet of communications they emphasize as their bread-and-butter.

Some (like Agora) emphasize real-time hi-res video. Twilio tries to strikea balance between voice and video communication.

Thus, it pays to consider exactly which WebRTC capabilities your project will use in both near- and far future before committing to a provider. Find a platform with the right strengths for better results – and ultimately, lower costs.

Our experience allows us to claim that we’re able to adapt for your telehealth needs the next popular WebRTC communication platforms:

• Twilio;
• Agora;
• Vidyo;
• Zoom;
• GoToMeeting;
• ClickMeeting;
• Vonage;
• VSee.

Twilio Webrtc Provider

Twilio Programmable Video covers all the bases with API’s for voice, video, and messaging. Twilio places a special emphasis on user verification and security.

The services are priced individually, starting at $0.0015 per minute/participant. All services are offered as pay-as-you-go, with no contracts and no minimum fees. Twilio also has a special Healthcare solution that is presented as a flexible and comprehensive answer to the modern challenges.

Doctor On Demand uses Twilio Programmable Video

Agora Webrtc Provider

Agora offers a wide set of services, with hi-res video being the star of the show. WebRTC services are priced by type of service. Video of 720p or less costs $3.99 per 1000 minutes (or $0,00399/minute), while hi-res commands a $14.99 for the same time ($0,01499). All pricing is pay-as-you-go with no upfront cost, and the first 10 000 minutes per month are free.

DrFirst and Agora partner to add telehealth to Backline HIPAA-compliant care collaboration platform

Vidyo Webrtc Provider

Vidyo provides multi-party video APIs for the web, mobile, and native endpoints. A fixed $65/month pricing point will bring you ongoing support and includes up to 6500 minutes of real-time communications. It also presents a Healthcare solution with special video conferencing capabilities.

Telehealth Solutions Powered by Vidyo. Source

Zoom Webrtc Provider

Zoom provides a full set of services needed to conduct video conferences for businesses of all sizes. The recent solution was launching a special Healthcare plan that costs $200 per account with 10 hosts.

What Zoom’s Customers Say. Source

GoToMeeting Webrtc Provider

GoToMeeting presents a set of subscription plans that differ in their features. Prising starts from €10.75 for a professional account, for enterprises there’s an option to set custom plans depending on the amount of employees.

ClickMeeting

ClickMeeting is another solution that is priced upon your chosen subscription plan. Depending on features included the prices start from $25 and may be adjusted individually according to your business needs.

Vonage Webrtc Provider

Vonage offers interactive video, video broadcast, voice (via SIP), and text messaging (via SMS/chat). A monthly base fee of $9.99 includes 2000 subscribed minutes (it is per receiver, and the sender does not pay for upstreaming their video). Higher volumes are priced in tiers starting at $0.00475/subscribed minute for the 2 000-100 000 minutes and thereafter decreases to $0.00400/subscribed minute for the 5M minutes.

Vsee Webrtc Provider

VSee provides a specialized telehealth solution for clinics in basic ($45 per month) and enterprise (the price is set individually depending on the number of employees) subscription plans. The difference is in features included into the plans.

VSee also provides Telemedicine Kit. Source

Integrating WebRTC with your app

The time needed for integration of the WebRTC solutions mentioned above is set individually according to the complexity of the current customer’s EHR/EMR system and the set of features, chosen according to the subscription plan.

In general all the process can be done in 1-3 months.

Summarizing all the above, using WebRTC solutions is the best way for those customers which need Telehealth features ASAP  without any excessive effort on “reinventing the wheel”. This technology already has many high-quality platform providers, so the competition among them will grow stronger, intensifying their deeper specialization in the market. By building a comprehensive use case for your project, you’ll be able to find the provider that offers the best overall value proposition not only in terms of cost per subscribed minute, but for the ongoing costs of further scaling development and adding new features.

Anyway, our company is always ready to help you in achieving your business goals in the most suitable way.