Congratulations!
You’ve successfully selected a vendor after you gathered your requirements and defined your needs.
The hard part is over.
Or is it?
In reality, now is when the “real work” begins.
Fortunately these days, the technical part of the installation of a new software is quite simple. For video visit solutions, it mostly entails setting up the enterprise account, configuring a few settings and then setting up all the users with their own account.
If you’ve opted for the EHR-integrated solution, it may be as simple as turning a switch.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
7 Steps to Launch a New Video Visit Solution
The selection and launch of a new Video Visit Vendor encompasses 3 phases:
A. Identify the needs and define the requirements
B. Evaluate and select a vendor
C. Switch over to the new vendor
For the third phase, here are the 7 typical steps to get from “selecting the vendor” to where clinicians and patients actually get to use the solution:
1. Engage the Vendor
2. Study Vendor Features and Functionality
3. Define/Revise Workflows
4. Develop Training for Clinicians, Nurses, Schedulers; Patients
5. Prepare for a Proof-of-Concept
6. Conduct Proof-of-concept and refine workflows, training
7. Manage transition to new vendor/workflows across the org
The first step, “Engage the Vendor”, is pretty straightforward – paperwork needs to be prepared, contracts to be signed and typically money will change hands.
So, now training begins, right?
Wrong!
Matching Expectations to Reality
A critical part of the first phase was to identify the specific expectations of the key users — clinicians and patients — as to their desired user experience. Another key outcome of that phase were the various workflows that the new solution would ideally support.
Now that you’ve selected the vendor (hopefully with a good fit for your needs), it’s time to make good on those implicit promises that were made at the beginning.
The first step is to actually first study the vendors features and functionality. While you may have seen a slick sales demo (or even tested it out in a trial), now it is time to systematically understand the basic functionality and all the bells and whistles the vendors have included in the solution you just bought.
As you do this review, it’s important to differentiate between features and functionality that is critical to your organization vs. the “nice to have” or “whoa, this is cool” features that may or may not be helpful as you are starting to use the tool.
Let me give you an example: When you buy Microsoft Word it comes with the built-in capability to automatically create a Table of Contents. While this is a useful feature (and it requires the disciplined use of “Heading” styles), it may not be the highest priority on your users’ mind, and you’d be wasting valuable training time to explain this “exciting” feature that most won’t use, at least not in the beginning.
The primary point of the exercise to systematically review the functionality of your new solution is that you can now envision how you can use this software to create the desired workflows you developed at the beginning, before selecting the vendor.
It’s all about the Flow of Work
Hopefully the vendor was chosen because of its good fit to your organization’s workflow and user experience needs, which should make this step easy.
To provide a few examples — with the new solution
1. How can we schedule new patient visits?
2. How can the clinician join a new meeting?
3. How will the patient know “where to go”?
etc.
Some organizations who are aiming to recreate the proven in-person experience may for example ask how live handoffs (from the rooming nurse to the clinician to the front office) can be handled.
An example: While Zoom does not offer a “hand off” function out of the box, you can use the waiting room feature combined with giving the nurse, clinician, and patient service representative access to the Zoom room as a co-host.
All-in-all, most video visit experiences need to typically define 7 different workflows – scheduling, new patient onboarding, rooming, visit, post-visit, follow-up, and billing.
The 3rd step of this phase is thus all about refining the workflows in the context of the capabilities of the selected vendor solution.
Please, Tell Me How
There are many critical aspects to a successful rollout, many of them anchored in effectively managing the inevitable and natural resistance to the change (more on that in step 7).
Two key aspects for success are to provide the users with the Knowledge and create the Ability to use the solution confidently and well.
With the solution available and the workflows refined, you are now able to design the training for the various “actors” of the various workflows.
E.g., you need to train schedulers on how to create a room link, or where to put a room link, and how to let the patients know where to go at the appointed time. You need to train clinicians on how to access their room at the appointed time and familiarize them with the user interface and the various features they indicated at the beginning that they are looking for.
I would also highly recommend observing patients trying out the solution, so that you have real-life feedback to design and improve your training materials.
In addition to training materials (here’s how we train clinicians) you also need to line up administrative, operational, and technical support — and include information in the training on how to access that support.
Are we there yet?
With the contract in place (step 1); armed with a thorough understanding of the solutions functionality and features (step 2); and with confidence in your refined workflows (step 3) and the newly developed training materials and support (step 4) you are now ready to let someone “try it out”.
But rather than approaching this “try out” attempt in an ad hoc way I will finish our 5-part article series on Vendor Selection to introduce you to a very reliable and systematic way to validate all the assumptions that implicitly and explicitly were made along the way: A proof of concept.
Have you selected a new Telehealth Vendor? What have you learned?
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Christian Milaster and his team optimize Telehealth Services for health systems and physician practices. Christian is the Founder and President of Ingenium Digital Health Advisors where he and his expert consortium partner with healthcare leaders to enable the delivery of extraordinary care.
Contact Christian by phone or text at 657-464-3648, via email, or video chat.
