Extending Greater Access to Care as a Competitive Advantage
Access to quality healthcare is critical for disease prevention, medication management, reducing unnecessary disability and death, and achieving health equity for all patients. While many health systems recognize the importance of ensuring greater access to care for their patients, most healthcare providers have yet to prioritize extending access as a step necessary for achieving better patient outcomes and ensuring business growth. The ones that do through services like telemedicine will reap the benefits and gain a competitive advantage in the healthcare marketplace.
Access to health services involves 3 steps:
- Close proximity to the point of service; living near the provider’s office
- Discovery of a quality and trustworthy healthcare provider
- Entry into the healthcare system (typically through insurance)
When these three items are achieved, so are the best health outcomes for patients. Beam Health, a telemedicine network that allows any provider or health system to list their services and have video consults with patients, helps patients in all three areas. By enabling physicians to deliver care to patients who may not live near where their offices are located, Beam helps patients overcome geographic location as a barrier for accessing timely health services.
Another key part of Beam’s model is to empower physicians to market their telehealth offerings to their existing patients. This model is in stark contrast with the traditional telemedicine model, which typically connects patients with random doctors that they have never met before. This distinction means that Beam connects patients with providers they already know and trust, which can be crucial for patients with special needs and more complex health conditions. With regards to the third step listed above, Beam enables both cash practices and medical practices that partner with insurance payers, seeking to give patients a wider array of cost options than they may have previously had.
Beam Health is a mobile app that allows for HD, HIPAA compliant video chats between patients and their providers. Because Beam has zero up-front costs and simply takes a $10 service fee from the revenue generated by each consult on their app, Beam gives physicians a no-risk option to increase profitability.
To aid doctors in driving demand for video consults, Beam offers free patient facing marketing campaigns. Every provider using Beam gets a free Beam website (see this example) along with free text message, email and print marketing campaigns. Doctors that sign up are encouraged to use these campaigns to market their new telemedicine services to their patients. This is a quick, free and painless way for doctors to provide the ease and accessibility of telemedicine to patients while growing their practices and revenue.
In the modern era of medicine, every provider has to consider extending greater access to care to their patients as an important step in achieving better health outcomes. Beam’s pay as you go telemedicine model and ease of use (zero up-front costs, training or implementation time required to start) makes telemedicine easy for any provider.