A couple of weeks ago Telehealth Tuesday celebrated its 4th birthday — over 200 articles on all things telehealth and digital health, from taxonomy to strategy, from optimization to measuring success.
If you find that amount of articles overwhelming, I’m right with you. Which is why last year we started compiling articles with a common theme into “resource collections”, which I’d like to share with you today.
In today’s special edition in recognition of Telehealth Tuesday’s milestone, here are 10 collections of articles that share a common theme.
#1: Digital Health & Telehealth Taxonomy
Since the worlds of Telehealth and Digital Health encompass a multitude of applications, this taxonomy (its origins going back to 2012) attempts to organize and hierarchically structure all things digital health – from remote physiological monitoring and video visits to clinical decision support systems and individualized medicine.
On the The Ingenium Digital Health Taxonomy page, you can download a whitepaper describing the domains of telemedicine, telehealth, connected health, health IT and precision medicine.
#2: Telehealth Program Maturity Model
If you want to find out how to get to where you want to be, it’s often easiest if you know where you are. The Telehealth Program Maturity Model provides that roadmap by classifying the maturity of telehealth programs into 7 categories from “chaotic” to “transformative”.
On the Telehealth Program Maturity Model page, you can find the recording of a 1-hour webinar on the maturity model, a Telehealth Maturity Self-Assessment and three articles on Telehealth Maturity, which are also available as a downloadable whitepaper.
#3: Telehealth Strategy & Business Plan
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there” is a common variation on the Cheshire cat’s advice to Alice in Wonderland. Without a strategy and without a business plan, efforts to improve, grow, or expand telehealth are haphazard at best or result in a wide rejection of telehealth.
A strategy provides clarity as to why and how telehealth is important to the organization, its patients, and its clinicians.
On the Telehealth Strategy & Business Plan page you will find four articles on the need for and structure of a sound strategy, including guidance on conducting a gap analysis on your organization’s telehealth strategy. In addition, you’ll also find those articles in the form of two white papers.
#4. The CEO Handbook for Telehealth Success
Success and the necessary change starts at the very top and in this series of 15 articles the CEO Handbook for Telehealth Success packages those articles into three white papers on the Magic of Telehealth (1), on achieving organizational success through telehealth (2) and on using telehealth strategically (3).
#5: Leadership’s Common Questions about Telehealth
The fifth collection is not an article, but rather an index of seven “frequently asked questions” by healthcare leadership about telehealth, that leads to further resources. The questions include: “Which Telehealth Technology is Best for Us?”, “How Can We Get the Most Out of Telehealth?”, and “What Should Our Overall Digital Health Strategy be?”
#6: Innovation in Healthcare
Both telehealth and digital health are the outcome of technical innovation in healthcare delivery (including diagnosis and treatment) over the past two decades. The lack of innovation thus has not been the problem — rather, at this stage it’s the slow pace of broader innovation adoption that is holding healthcare back.
On this page about Innovation in Healthcare, we share a number of resources that describe the problem and offer guidance and solutions. Included are a 2023 podcast interview and six articles from: “Accelerating Innovation Adoption” to “Successful Innovation Implementation”.
#7: Digital Health
The world of digital health, as a superset of telehealth, holds the next challenge for healthcare innovation adoption. Digital Therapeutics and digitally-aided diagnostic tools (even in primary care and behavioral health) will fundamentally change the way healthcare is delivered.
On our Digital Health page, we cover six articles from asking organizations if they are prepared for the “Digital Health Avalanche” to a couple of articles on the different domains and definitions of digital health.
#8: Measuring Telehealth Success
One of the most common traits of ineffective management is the “set and forget” approach, where an initiative is launched or a task is delegated, but where accountability is never provided.
Measuring Telehealth Success covers over eight articles and a white paper what to measure and how to measure telehealth success — and why it is so important to manage telehealth performance.
#9: Optimizing Telehealth
Virtually (pun intended) everybody in healthcare was thrown into Telehealth in response to the Covid-19 health crisis, though most ended up practicing good old phone care, since without support and well-defined workflows video visits were simply not working for most clinicians and patients.
Now that health systems and health centers realize the potential for telehealth and the interest in telehealth by the Modern Healthcare Consumer, many forward-looking leaders are contemplating, how they could be leveraging telehealth for financial and strategic success at their organization.
On our comprehensive page on Optimizing Telehealth, we cover the principles of telehealth optimization in four articles, followed by five articles on specific optimization tactics ranging from the most crucial skill of change management to the equally critical design and deployment of telehealth-specific workflows.
#10: Bill of Telehealth Rights
Rounding out our top 10 resource pages from the foundation of 200 Telehealth Tuesday articles comes a slightly tongue-in-cheek “Bill of Telehealth Rights”: one for the clinicians (“you have the right to user-friendly, reliable, secure technology”) and one for the patients (“you have the right to adequate post-visit service”).
Telehealth Tuesday’s Mission
I hope you enjoyed this listing of the 10 resource pages, providing a shortcut to some of the most important and most relevant Telehealth Tuesday articles published since October 2019.
The mission of Telehealth Tuesday is to educate, to share best practices, and to share insights that we are gaining as we are helping health systems, health centers, behavioral health agencies, rural health clinics, and critical access hospitals to gain the most value out of telehealth.
What topics should Telehealth Tuesday cover next? Let us know…
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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.
