Recent pressures for healthcare providers to both reduce hospital readmission rates and find convenient, affordable care solutions for patients, clients and employees are causing many businesses to turn to telehealth.

Telehealth has swiftly grown in popularity as a way to more efficiently manage care and improve wellness. According to a recent article in Medical Economics, telehealth harnesses the potential to save billions annually in healthcare costs.

However, as your company evaluates incorporating a telehealth program into your business model, an important aspect to consider is the regular healthcare needs of your current customers, who are the end users of any telehealth practices you might choose to employ.

How can your clients reap the benefits of telehealth?

Telehealth practices allow for interaction of patients and health professionals via communications devices, such as video monitors or phones. They also can collect data from monitoring devices that can track blood pressure, weight and other vital signs that are transmitted via technology to a hub where they are read and interpreted by qualified health professionals. Remote monitoring can drastically reduce the number of office visits per month for a person with chronic disease, as well as prevent unnecessary trips to the emergency room — increasing convenience, decreasing anxiety and reducing costs.

Evaluating both the profiles and wellness needs of your clients will help you craft a plan for what types of equipment and support you will need to get started, and make you less likely to overspend on things that won't serve your customers or your company well.

For example, if you operate a home health care agency, your clientele is likely comprised of older adults in the 80-plus range, an age group with a higher incidence of chronic disease than their younger peers. Understanding the average age of your clients and their chronic conditions, as well as how often clients have questions about their conditions and receive visits from nurses, can all help you assess what components of a telehealth program might be useful to your clients.

It's also essential to evaluate what customers will pay for privately and what services might be reimbursable in your particular business model and based on your payer mix.

Another way to evaluate your customers' potential telehealth needs is to gauge and build their interest in telehealth. More consumers are beginning to understand the impact and savings that telehealth technology can have on cost and care by making access to health professionals both more affordable and convenient.

You might find that your customers are more receptive than you thought they would be to a telehealth program. Or you might find that there is a group of clients who need more convincing, in which case it will help if you begin communicating with them now about the advantages of telehealth to build their interest and ease concerns prior to launching a telehealth program.

Additionally, analyze how much time you are spending with clients and what particular types of encounters take up the most of your time. This will help you determine how much time implementing a telehealth program could save and how that would translate into cost savings for your company and customers.

Partner with telehealth experts

Evaluating the telehealth needs of your clients can be a complex and highly analytical process that can take a lot of time and attention away from running your business right now. For that reason, it can be extremely beneficial to work with an expert telehealth consultant who has experience analyzing business and client needs and customizing remote patient monitoring services for a variety of industries.

A seasoned telehealth expert will understand how to work with home healthcare agencies, insurance companies, healthcare systems and other businesses, and ultimately increase profitability while allowing owners and operators to maintain their focus on the bottom line.

It's also helpful to work with a telehealth company that provides its own clinical back end so that technology and personnel are already working together in your company's favor. This will allow you to have a customized work flow and program objectives to meet the needs of your organization and your patients. All of this works together to produce desired outcomes and a more satisfactory patient experience, which translates to reduced training time and overall costs for your business.

As technology has grown to become a fixture in our lives, more patients are willing to embrace the benefits and convenience of telehealth than ever before. Embrace telehealth for your business by finding out what your customers need and designing a program that will meet and exceed those needs.