Telehealth options in healthcare of any kind are increasing in availability at a rapid rate. While the pandemic certainly helped pushed many occupations into a more digital world, it’s always been moving towards an option with less human interaction. If your business or practice hasn’t started thinking forward about telehealth, you need to start gathering knowledge and preparing your team for it.
The great thing is, thanks to technology, you and your team can take courses online without having to travel to any one location. The top 5 telehealth courses online for you to learn how to implement it are:
Online courses are the best option for your team because it is far easier to get together in a room and go through a class or a section rather than requiring everyone to drive to a different location every time the class meets. This way, your entire team can work through everything at the same time so everyone is on the same page and implementation can happen a lot sooner and smoother.
What Is Telehealth?
Telehealth is the practice of medicine, just like going to the doctor, over some sort of remote technology. Essentially you are having a doctor’s visit over the phone, through talking or texting, or through a video call using some type of video application. This gives patients and doctors the ability to see more people in one day, or even see a patient that otherwise would not have been able to attend an appointment.
Now, telehealth can also mean that doctors are consulting other doctors across distances using remote technology as well. If a doctor needs a specialist to read a scan or test results, this is also considered telehealth. While it falls more directly under Telemedicine, both categories are fully under telehealth.
Many physicians choose different ways to communicate to their patients depending on a few variables such as:
- Reason for visit
- Patients resources
- Doctors resources
- Urgency of visit
Depending on your reason for the appointment, the doctor may simply need to talk to their patient over the phone, or they may need to see their face while the appointment happens. No matter the reason, being able to talk to your patient in these ways versus them having to go to a physical location can help quite a few things such as:
- Contagious sickness spreading
- Causing transportation issues with the patient
- Overbooking the doctor’s office and patient rooms
- Overcrowded waiting rooms
The pandemic greatly showed how big of an issue these simple things are for those who are sick and for your practice to be able to circumvent that speaks volumes about what you would be able to do for your patients.
What Skills Do You Need For Telehealth?
While you need the same skills for telehealth that you would require for a normal healthcare professional, there are a few skills that either need to be improved on, or learned specifically for telehealth advancements. Since most of your conversations with patients will be over the phone, through written communications, or through video, you may need a few more skills that would be different in a face-to-face conversation.
You specifically need to ensure your written communication skills are basic copywriting level as well as understanding web and written text etiquette. You will compose emails, text messages, and digital documents multiple times a day, sometimes multiple times for one patient and you need to ensure you can clearly communicate your point without losing any information or without it going over your patient’s head.
Your listening skills need to be at an all-time high when dealing with telehealth communication. You will likely sit through multiple phone or video calls in an hour or two and you need to be able to fully give your attention to each and every detail. You can not simply sit and watch someone talk, you have to be involved with your listening. Being able to repeat back to someone the things they said, or being able to help them think through symptoms or problems is a great way to show you are listening.
Time management skills are a huge necessity in telehealth. You have to be able to control the length of each call because your patients may have all the time in the world, but you have other patients to get to. It’s important to be able to communicate to your patient the desired length of the appointment and then cut it off at that time in an effective but respectful way.
It’s also important to keep yourself managed when you are researching or looking for things online. Time can quickly slip away from you while you are doing research, or you can get distracted by things that interfere with your work.
You will absolutely need a level of technical skills when working in telehealth. While you may not need to know how to write code, you will need to know how to set up a video call or use digital documents from time to time. If you are not knowledgable about these things, thankfully the internet is full of videos that can show you how to do whatever you need, or any application your choose to use for telehealth usually has customer support that can walk you through the setup as well.
What Is Telehealth Implementation?
Telehealth implementation is the steps and process you take to figure out if you need telehealth, and how to implement it into your practice. The American Medical Association has a 12 Step Process on how to recognize the need and how to implement telehealth into your practice or group.
The biggest pieces of implementing telehealth in your organization are figuring out if you need it and getting enough people on board to create a good appointment system. Most of the time, one doctor doing it by themselves is not going to cut it so you need a whole team that can take on the telehealth appointments and research.
Once you gather a team, you need to start learning about telehealth together and figuring out how you can implement it in your organization without causing too much chaos and stress. The best way to do this is to take courses online that give information to help you achieve all your goals.
The 5 Best Telehealth Courses Online
The easiest way to get your telehealth education and certification is to take an online course. Online courses afford you the ability to go at your own pace in any location you wish. However, there are so many online courses, is usually hard to pick ones that are worth it. The great thing is, here are the 5 best telehealth courses you can find online.
1. Stanford Telehealth: Strategy, Implementation, And Organization
The University Of Stanford has a 6-week course that can help you and your organization branch out into telehealth and its many benefits. If you are an executive or manager in the healthcare industry, you will get insights into the financial, legal, and operational operations and how to incorporate that into your business that is already thriving.
If you are a doctor or medical professional of any caliber, this course can help you learn how to implement telehealth into your practice while also incorporating your team and using everyone’s strengths to make this work. If you need to pitch this idea to your peers or managers, this course can help you do that as well.
While the price is a bit steep for someone who doesn’t know if you even want to incorporate telehealth into your practice, $2,800 is worth the money for a culture that is increasingly diving into digital meetings and appointments. Eventually, the companies that don’t have telehealth options are going to be less used than others, so even if you take the course now and don’t use the information until months or years from now, taking the course is still a good option.
2. Central Penn College Essential Telehealth Skills
Central Penn College has a great certification program for telehealth and all the things it consists of. This course can help you and your organization meet the demand for those who need telehealth to be able to properly see a doctor
This course is only 5 weeks of work because it’s accelerated and it condenses all you need to know in a format easy for teams to fully embrace and work through together. While the original price of this course was $995, for healthcare providers it’s only $500.
Now, it’s absolutely work noting that this course is a non-degree, non-credit course. You can collect 17 continuing education hours and you will receive a certificate at the end, but those are the only perks you get from the class except all the knowledge.
3. Core Concepts In Telehealth Certification Program
If you are looking for a course that focuses on the ethics, operations, and regulation side of telehealth, the American Board Of Telehealth has a fantastic course that focuses on just that. Knowing this information can help with better implementation and smooth out processes that telehealth requires to start up.
Before you even register for the course you can see the syllabus, the reasons for the course, what you will learn, and the knowledge and tools you will walk away with. This course contains so many fantastic resources to help you and your team effectively implement telehealth into your practice.
For individuals to take the course it usually costs from $149-$395 depending on if you are a continuing student or not, however, they offer group rates if you want your entire team to take it.
4. Telemental Health Training
If you are a health professional in the mental health branch of medicine, you may think that telehealth isn’t an option for you. However, you can do telehealth just as well as any other provider. The Telehealth Certification Institute has an entire catalog of courses specifically dedicated to helping mental health practitioners implement telehealth in their organizations.
The courses range from learning the basics of financials and ethics, to creating a safe space for meetings and appointments where patients feel safe talking and sharing. These courses range anywhere from $30-$1000 depending on the length and type of information being taught, but almost all of this gives you a certification or continuing education hours.
5. Cornell Telemedicine
While many places have telemedicine courses, Cornell is such an esteemed college that you know people will recognize where you got your training and you can fully trust your information and knowledge from there. If you are skeptical of places other than learning institutions, then this is the perfect course for you.
This course focuses on learning how to communicate with body language and nonverbal cues through video and phone calls. Being able to communicate effectively, through all avenues, especially in a digital era is extremely difficult but it is a skill you need to learn and practice often.
This course is a 2-week course that is entire instructor-led but only requires a minimum of 3-5 hours from you each week. This can easily be done by yourself, with a few people, or with an entire team.
Final Thoughts On Telehealth Courses
Telehealth courses can be incredibly helpful in getting your team on board and prepared for the telehealth process and implementation. You can find many courses that specifically allow group rates so your entire team can receive the same training to help keep everyone on the same page.
Telehealth courses are absolutely worth the money you will spend taking them because they will allow you to retain and attract new patients with your telehealth implementation.
