Run a contactless clinic - The complete guide
While the pandemic has amplified the need for contactless healthcare services, contactless technologies have also enabled the digital healthcare environment to advance and expand.
The future of healthcare is digital. Turning your clinic contactless is relevant to not only today but also the new normal in the post-COVID-19 period, which also demonstrates your organizational agility.
Most importantly, contactless services can streamline your practices and greatly improve your productivity and efficiency.
As the healthcare industry at its core is about patient comfort and wellness, running a contactless practice to protect your patients from the spread of Covid-19 is no longer merely an option, but a requirement to emerge as front-runners in the industry.
Expanding your contactless services while responding swiftly to the pandemic should thus be put as your business priority.
In this article, we will bring you through the reasons why you should run a contactless clinic, the contactless services you can provide, and how to run it.
Why you should run a contactless clinic
All the fabulous reasons for a contactless clinic boil down to three main points: relevancy, agility, and productivity.
Patients trust clinics that prioritise their safety and wellness. It is undeniably crucial that your clinic take necessary measures, like offering contactless services, to protect your patients from the spread of a contagious disease.
The digitalisation of healthcare services and operational processes has already approached a tipping point before the pandemic, and the current COVID-19 pandemic crisis has become a catalyst for the growth of contactless healthcare services.
In the journal ‘Opportunities and challenges for contactless healthcare services in the post-COVID-19 Era‘ , it was concluded that the competitiveness in the healthcare sector is determined by whether they can decipher how the different digital tech-based services, which were introduced to tackle a pandemic, can be transformed and sustained in the post-pandemic norm.
While some studies such as ‘From high-touch to high-tech: COVID-19 drives robotics adoption‘ have reported that contactless services with advanced technologies are likely to infiltrate people’s lives even after the pandemic, a study done by McKinsey on telehealth have emphasised that the pandemic has brought new opportunities for various industries, especially service industries.
The digitalisation of healthcare services is an inevitable trend if you look at it in a bigger picture. Except for the circumstances of a pandemic, the rising costs of healthcare services, the increasingly ageing population that leads to the deficiency of manpower and healthcare resources, and the increasing importance of patient care quality all call for more efficient and productive healthcare delivery approaches.
A contactless clinic is thus the answer not only for now but also for the future.
In the digital age, many hospitals and clinics have already started pursuing innovations for contactless processes and services to improve productivity and organisational agility.
Having a plan to integrate offline and online services with contactless operational processes for efficient management of your clinic’s healthcare resources is thus crucial and relevant even beyond the pandemic.
What contactless services your clinic can provide
A big part of contactless healthcare services is telemedicine, which can be characterised by three types: store-and-forward telemedicine, remote patient monitoring, real-time interactive telemedicine.
COVID-19 has caused a massive acceleration in the use of telemedicine. McKinsey COVID-19 Consumer Survey in 2020 shows that US consumer adoption of telemedicine rises from 11% in 2019 to 46%, and the report by McKinsey on telehealth also shows the use of telemedicine by physicians and healthcare organizations has expanded by 50 to 175 times.
As the pandemic expedites the adoption of telemedicine, Global Market Insights also predicts the capital size of the global telemedicine market, which was estimated at US$45.5 billion in 2019, to reach $175.5 billion by 2026 owing to growth drivers, such as the “rising cases of COVID-19 infections across the globe, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, a growing number of smartphone users, technological advances related to mobile phones and the Internet, greater need for cost-savings in healthcare delivery, and long waiting time in hospitals for disease treatment in 2026″.
If you want efficient management of your clinic’s resources and productive practices to boost your patient care quality and revenue, telemedicine is the ultimate solution.
For a detailed introduction of the telemedicine services available and relevant regulations, check out our complete guide on telemedicine for doctors in Singapore.
Besides telemedicine, there are many other contactless services implemented during the pandemic, such as safety management of your patients and staff through mobile platforms and chatbots and administrative procedures. In Singapore, patients should fill up the self-checkup questionnaire sent with appointment reminders and present the form at the time of visit. Many healthcare organisations also deliver employee training through video conferencing. There are also applications of robots in the disinfection of public areas and ensuring that people conform to social distancing rules.
One significant field of contactless healthcare is AI-based healthcare. In May 2020, James Manyika (Co-Chair and Director of the McKinsey Global Institute) and Kevin Scott (Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft) spoke about the vast potential of AI in healthcare and agreed that AI has been an effective technology in combatting COVID-19 and other contagious diseases in the future as it helps predict, prevent, and treat the cases.
How to run a contactless clinic
It is impossible to run a contactless clinic without technologies.
To ensure the safety of your staff, clinicians, and patients, you need to monitor their body temperature when they enter your clinic and maybe an app to track your employees’ interactions and monitor whether they are complying with social distancing rules.
With current technologies equipped with a quality clinic management system, you can easily provide telemedicine services, streamline your practices, and turn many administrative procedures contactless. For example, you can have an online scheduling system that greatly reduces no-shows and cancellation. Meanwhile, instead of having kiosks for patient registration and data collection, you can provide patients with a link or an app so they can use their own devices for registration, reducing the possibility of cross-contamination.
One bonus of equipping your clinic with a quality clinic management system is having not only contactless but also paperless practices, which can greatly reduce manual errors and costs of paper and hardware while helping you save more time for patient care. Read more on why you should go paperless with your clinic.
Another essential part of contactless services is payment. Mastercard saw a 40% jump in contactless payments during the first quarter of 2020. Mobile payments are already taking off, so make sure your clinic can accept contactless payment as it is gaining increasing popularity.
Conclusion
Contactless healthcare is not a trend to be taken lightly. Turning your clinic contactless does not only improve the efficiency and productivity of your practices but also help you stay relevant with agility.
Run a contactless clinic with UNO CMS
Source:
Opportunities and challenges for contactless healthcare services in the post-COVID-19 Era by Sang M. Lee and DonHee Lee
From high-touch to high-tech: COVID-19 drives robotics adoption by Zhanjing Zeng, Po-Ju Chen & Alan A. Lew
Telehealth: A quarter-trilliondollar post-COVID-19 reality? by Mckinsey