For Physicians

Physicians currently have an unprecedented opportunity to benefit from telemedicine, whether they work in hospital systems, independent practices, or both.

Specialists in an ever-increasing number of disciplines can dramatically expand their patient base in number, geographic reach, and variety of patient cases:

• In a world in which telemedicine links a network of specialists effectively with primary care physicians, the overhead of taking on and managing patients remains concentrated at the patient's home care office instead of being repeated at each specialist visit.  Greatly reducing the time and resources needed for on-boarding patients, specialists who devote all or part of their practice to telemedicine have significantly more time available to review and diagnose cases - they can thus see many more patients each day.  The same is true on the follow-up end of case handling:  the large number of routine treatment regimes prescribed by the specialist can be managed long term by the patient's primary care physician, with specialist intervention handled remotely when needed.
  

• Because telemedicine relieves the need for patients to travel to see specialists, patients can be drawn to specialty and sub-specialty practices from a much wider geographic area.  This also increases both the number and interest level of cases available to the specialist in his or her practice.

• As many cases reviewed via telemedicine can be handled quickly and asynchronously,  specialists can have more control over their own schedules and work locations.

Primary care physicians benefit significantly as well:

• Once a patient has been brought into the practice, the primary care physician can "own" and manage the care of the patient throughout multiple cycles of diagnosis and treatment, backed up by a broad and deep pool of specialty expertise.  Patients remain an active part of the primary care physician's practice instead of "disappearing" after a specialist referral is made.
  

• Patients get the very positive experience of receiving the benefit of a variety of specialists through the customer service experience created by a single primary care physician.  Telemedicine can create the very powerful patient experience that both the specialist and the primary care physician are seeing him at the same time.

• In cases in which previously a patient may have been seeing several specialists in parallel without an overarching care plan, the quality of patient care can be  greatly improved  by the consistent and coordinating attention of the single primary care physician.

Last but not least:  because of the efficiencies and flexibility telemedicine brings to networked care, its successful application will become hugely important to how accountable care organizations are run.

At SecondLook we are very careful to identify and balance the medical, clinical, and operational needs and goals of the physicians involved in telemedicine programs.   There is nothing more important in a telemedicine project than making everything work smoothly for patient and doctor.  The needs and roles of physicians are a major focus in our delivery of assessment, implementation and ongoing support services.
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