Follow along with our new blog series #HealthcareNow and #PublicSectorNow, where we’ll addresses healthcare innovation around the world and how to maintain business continuity in today’s health climate. 

The healthcare landscape is quickly changing and we’re entering a new era of patient-centered care delivery – one that is not bound by location.

Healthcare providers have been forced to adapt and scale virtual consultations and telehealth at a rapid pace. Arguably, we’ve seen greater adoption of telehealth in the last few months than in the last few years.

While this new frontier of telehealth opens up great opportunity for innovation, better patient care, and streamlined clinical operations, it also brings challenges in security and scalability.

How can your healthcare organization scale to meet the demands of patients today, while best preparing for what’s next?

Telehealth today

Let’s first start with defining telehealth, as the term is used widely and broadly. Telehealth is the use of electronic information and technology to support remote monitoring, virtual care, distance health care, provider video consultation, clinical communications and health-related training and education.

Even before this year, patients were demanding better experiences from their healthcare providers. In fact, 71% of providers in this survey said that patient engagement was their top priority. And hospitals that provide superior patient experience have net margins that are 50% higher than average performers.

Source 

Through Cisco’s industry-leading healthcare technologies, we’re able to deliver secure telehealth solutions for hospitals and clinics around the world. Telehealth isn’t new for Cisco. During this time of rapid adoption, we’re here for you, and we are committed to helping you effectively implement and scale your telehealth practice.

We can help:

• Make virtual care and communication feel like a face-to-face interaction with high-quality video consultations.
• Enable clinicians and care teams to work remotely from home, minimizing risk of physical contact.
• Expand your patient’s care team to include experts at other facilities.
• Integrate telehealth workflows into EHR and EMR applications, powering collaboration across the healthcare system with Webex Teams and our SDKs and APIs.
• Streamline staff workflow and clinical efficiency, saving money, time, and travel costs for both patients and their care teams.
• Improve scheduling through contact center technology, helping to manage the volume of patient calls now and once elective surgeries and appointments need to be scheduled.
• Scale health system-wide broadcasts and meetings for knowledge share and training.

But is it secure?

Along with great disruption in the telehealth space comes new threats and challenges. We know that security and data privacy are of paramount importance to your organization. We are here for you, and we can help.

At Cisco, we take our customers’ data security seriously, and we are dedicated to providing world-class collaboration that is simple, scalable, and designed to meet your HIPAA compliance needs. In line with the HIPAA Security Rule, Cisco implements all the addressable specifications that are relevant to Cisco Webex services. These are segmented into three safeguards – Administrative, Physical and Technical. Read this blog post to see how we’re helping to protect your healthcare data.

In addition to securing our Webex tools, we also help protect identities and access management through Duo, Umbrella, Advanced Malware Protection and AnyConnect. Learn more about our Secure Remote Worker solution that keeps your staff protected as they work from home.

Scaling with security in mind 

As we move from reactive to proactive, it’s important to think about what’s next in telehealth.

How will the rapid adoption of virtual consultation, provider video consult and remote work change the expectations of clinicians and patients? Moving forward, will healthcare staff demand the option for remote work? Will we be better prepared with the right technology and workflows to manage effectively in the future?

As telehealth quickly becomes the new “normal,” it’s imperative that you consider both speed to market and long-term functionality when selecting your technology partner. And, above all, is your new telehealth solution secure, does it ensure privacy, and does it enable compliance?

Remember, the decisions you make today will set the foundation for the future of virtual consultation and telehealth in your healthcare organization. Choose wisely!

We’d love to hear what you think. Comment below and stay tuned for the next blog in our #HealthcareNow series.

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