5 Ways to Monetize and Make Money from Telehealth in Your Practice
Prior to the pandemic, many healthcare professionals were reluctant to implement telehealth and telemedicine services in their practice believing that it wasn’t profitable, widely used, or accepted by insurance. “How much should I charge for a telemedicine visit” or even “can I charge for a telemedicine visit” have been the top two questions we hear from providers.
While telemedicine was not as available or profitable in its infancy, over the last few years new data and a global pandemic has shown significant growth in the opportunity to make money from telehealth services. Some practices and practitioners have built an entire practice business model around paid telemedicine coaching and consultation sessions.
According to the American Medical Association, telehealth represented less than 1% of the total health care volume in the United States prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (1).
But data now shows us it is widely adopted across all verticals in the industry and with the change in CPT codes over the past year, providers CAN be reimbursed by Medicare and most insurance for time spent virtually with patients. And you can charge cash for telemedicine.
So let’s debunk these myths, and go over the best strategies for making telehealth services a profitable part of your practice.
Here are 5 Ways to Monetize Telehealth in your Practice:
1. Maximize Patient Visits
It’s no secret that many patients often skip medical visits or forgo medical care due to extenuating circumstances in their personal lives, or hesitancy to show up in person, much of which has been exacerbated by COVID-19.
According to the American Medical Association, 41% of patients preferred a video visit to an in person visit to their healthcare provider (2). That’s almost half of patients surveyed.
This means that just by offering and promoting telehealth services you’ll be able to meet the needs of this group of patients and potentially gain new patients.
2. Optimize Your Time
On average, patients see their doctor for only 20 minutes. Between running their practice, managing staff, and administrative duties, U.S. doctors spend less time with each patient. A typical primary physician can see up to 100 patients in a given week. However, most of that time is spent conducting EHR and administrative duties surrounding the physical exam (3).
With a telemedicine solution, healthcare providers can reduce that administrative burden and have the ability to see potentially five times the amount of patients in a given week while charging anywhere from $40 to $75 for the same 20 minute exam (3).
A quick consult online can save you valuable time when done efficiently. That being said, a great way to monetize your telehealth services is to optimize your scheduling and time spent during these visits.
3. Optimize Which Patients Utilize Telehealth and When
In other words, stick to scheduling telehealth visits for patients with circumstances such as these:
- May not require an in depth physical examination
- Comes in regularly for chronic conditions/check ups
- Needs a standard follow up to update prescriptions
- Patients with few changes in medical history.
In these instances it may be best to conduct a telehealth visit. According to McKinsey & Company, two-thirds of physicians and 60 percent of patients said they agreed that virtual health is more convenient than in-person visit (4).
This doesn’t mean that in-person visits are obsolete, but what it does mean is that certain visits could save valuable time for you and your patient if scheduled correctly.
When patients are offered the option of in person versus telehealth, explain to them the benefits of each.
4. Offer Group Visits
Promoting efficiency in your practice doesn’t mean you need to forgo valuable time spent with patients.
A national survey released by The Physicians Foundation (5) found that only 11% of patients felt they have enough time with their physicians. And it seems as though healthcare providers agree as the same survey found that only 14% of physicians felt their visits offered all the time needed to provide the highest standards of care to their patients (6).
That’s why Group Visits are a fantastic way to spend a large chunk of time with patients that require similar care.
Through this format patients to get extended educational resources and time spent with their care provider and in turn you are able to significantly cut down on the time it would spend to meet with each patient individually.
And when conducted with the use of HIPAA compliant telehealth solutions, you can combine patient convenience with increased time spent with patients.
5. Bundle Your Telehealth Services with Other Practice Management Tools
Utilize a practice management system that offers Telehealth as well as additional tools for your practice to get the best bang for your buck. If you’re paying for Telehealth separately, you may be losing money.
For example, your telehealth provider could be offering a host of other functions such as HIPAA compliant messaging, the ability to prescribe medical wellness protocols, group visit functionality and so much more.
BodySite knows that healthcare providers can and should make money using telehealth, so it’s always included a way for providers to charge for virtual visits using the Virtual Clinic on its platform. As an extension of that offering, BodySite has now added the ability to charge different prices for various visit types. So, for example, maybe you want to offer free initial consults with patients but charge a fee for follow up visits. Or maybe you want to charge different prices for every single visit-type. With our new Virtual Clinic pricing options, you can!
To start monetizing BodySite’s telehealth Virtual Clinic, follow the steps outlined below:
- First, make sure your Virtual Clinic is turned on. To do that, go to Settings > Platform Settings and turn on the Virtual Clinic. If you’re going to use our scheduling feature, also turn on Virtual Clinic Scheduling.
- Under that same tab (Settings > Platform Settings), confirm that you have a Stripe account configured for your platform. If not, follow the prompts to set up your Stripe account. This is how payments will be processed on the platform.
- Open the Virtual Clinic from the top navigation of the platform
- If you plan to allow patients to check in for walk-in visits and you’d like to charge a set fee for walk-in visits, click on Virtual Clinic Settings. If you only want to have scheduled visit-types and no walk-in visits, skip to step 6.
- Set your Virtual Clinic availability hours for walk-in visits. Again, if you don’t want to allow for walk-in visits, skip to step 6. Where it says Virtual Visit Cost to Patient, choose your price. This will be your cost for walk-in visits only. You will set the cost for your other visit-types in the following steps. Click save and then exit out of the Virtual Clinic Settings modal.
- Click on Manage Visit Pricing, near the bottom of the page.
- Click on +New Visit Price. You can choose a label for this price and the price for this visit price. Note: You CAN create a visit price that’s $0 if you’re going to be offering free visits for some event types. Select Save+Create Price.
- Click on Manage Scheduling (Note: In order to see this option, you will have needed to add your calendar to your Virtual Clinic. If you haven’t done that yet, you can follow the steps outlined at this link to set up your calendar and scheduling system).
- Under any of your Virtual Clinic event-types listed, you can click the pencil icon to the right of the price listed. A dropdown will appear with all of your visit price options that you set up in step 7. Choose your price and click Save to save your choice.
- When your patients schedule one of your visit types, they will be prompted to pay the fee you’ve set when they check in for their visit with you.
If you’re not already using BodySite, try it free today to get started using its remote patient care and monitoring solution as well as telehealth.
SOURCES:
1. https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/digital/2022-moving-beyond-telehealth-digitally-enabled-care
3. https://bodysite.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/telemedicine-today-4.pdf