How to Set Up Telemedicine With Your Practice

Telemedicine has been the buzzword during COVID19. You may have heard practices around the world are utilizing this new technology to meet with patients during the pandemic. But you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon yet. You’re nervous. You like your practice the way it is, why should you throw in something new like telemedicine and give yourself a headache? However, with COVID-19 creating barriers for patients to come to your practice, you’re beginning to wonder if it’s worth investigating. What if we told you that setting up a telemedicine practice wasn’t difficult and, in fact, would make your life easier and improve the care your patients receive?

Here is what you can expect from the process:

Find Your State’s Telemedicine Laws
Find a Partner
Beam Health setup
EHR and Schedule Integration
Marketing Telemedicine to current and prospective patients
Billing Telemedicine with Beam
Support

Setting Up Your Telemedicine Practice

The first step in setting up a telemedicine practice is knowing your state’s telemedicine laws. Laws vary state by state, including what states consider to be telemedicine. For a comprehensive look at your state’s telemedicine guidelines, visit the Center for Connected Health Policy’s Current State Laws & Reimbursement Policies page for an in-depth look at how each state defines telemedicine and more.

Once you know the laws that your telemedicine practice must abide by, the next step is finding a telemedicine partner that works for you. We believe you are in the right place! Beam Health’s platform integrates with any practice without having that practice to change their workflow.

Creating and activating a Beam account is easy and we have found that the vast majority of providers have their telemedicine practices up and running within 24 hours. The process is quite simple: Contact someone from our implementation team, follow their instructions, and within 24 hours you have a Beam telemedicine practice ready to go!

After creating and activating your Beam account, it’s important to integrate Beam into your workflow; to make your new telemedicine practice work with existing EHR platforms and scheduling software. Luckily, Beam is easily integrated into any workflow. Simply contact a member from our Beam team and we can create a custom integration solution that fits 55 different EHR platforms in under 2 weeks! And when it comes to your scheduling software, don’t worry, just continue to schedule your appointments as you always have. At the time of the appointment, select the patient whom the appointment is scheduled and the Beam app will send them an invite to a secure, HIPAA compliant consultation.

Your telemedicine practice is set up, running, and fully functional! But how do you let patients know that you have an exciting new tool at their disposal? Not to worry, Beam supplies all of its customers with a free text message and email campaign to invite patients to register for telemedicine. They will be taken to a co-branded landing page, (built by Beam) that walks them through the registration process and captures consent for telemedicine.

Current patients know about your new telemedicine practice, but what about prospective patients? Beam believes it is our job to help your practice. With the text and email campaign, as well as the co-branded landing page, Beam will also supply you with the Beam Button to install on your website, letting visitors know of your telemedicine capabilities, and will also send you co-branded flyers to put in your office so when patients come to visit they know that telemedicine is now available.

Your telemedicine practice is set up, current and prospective patients know of your new capability, but how do you collect payment when it comes to telemedicine? For more information on billing, please visit our Billing page where we outline different billing practices for telemedicine, including our ability to collect payment for your telemedicine practice and even pay any credit card processing fees.

With any new technology, there will be hurdles that you and patients may face along the way. At times, you may have a bad connection and the appointment may be interrupted. Don’t worry we have you covered. Beam has a support team that is ready to answer any and all questions in real-time to help resolve and improve our service.

This is a quick overview of how to set up a telemedicine practice with Beam. To have a more in-depth look at the Beam platform, please schedule a time for a personal demo with a member of our Beam team!