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a company that specializes in strategic healthcare initiatives such as mergers and acquisitions, management services organizations, private equity, succession planning, physician partnerships, and strategic planning. He can be reached at 

Articles

While analyzing the competition is an essential component of your strategy, most medical practices don't conduct this type of analysis systematically enough.

Are you working on a 2025 strategy?

Ryne Natzke is Chief Revenue Officer at TrustCommerce, a Sphere Company.

Practices have tools at their disposal that can help alleviate some of the problems that women face with health care affordability and access. 

How digital tools can alleviate health care access and affordability issues for women

Your monthly collection of insights from the Physicians Practice Pearls writers is available now!

Physicians Practice digital edition: Best states to practice

Nance Goldstein, MDc, ACC, PhD, partners with physicians as a leadership coach to find ways through today’s tough times and enjoy medicine more.

Her evidence-based work enables physicians to sail through the challenges of influencing others to deliver excellent care. Her clients learn simple, quick ways to lead high quality, thriving care groups – one conversation at a time. She’s an Affiliate Faculty at AriadneLabs (Brigham & Womens Hospital and Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health), as well as a scholar at Brandeis University WSRC. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nancegoldstein/

, curates recent research and stories of physicians making medical practice better – leadership that honors their purpose 

 improves their experience of practicing.

Her podcast offers conversations with seasoned women MDs talking about how they navigated the competing demands of practice, family and the rest of life.

She’d like to hear what troubles you in your practice. Email her: 

De-escalating situations and emotions can settle disagreements between staff members.

Messy Moments: Dial down the drama

Physicians Practice offers practical, proven solutions to the real-world concerns physicians and medical practices face every day.

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The benefits and challenges of providing care on America’s last frontier.

Practicing medicine in remote Alaska

Since there are simply too few doctors in far too many rural communities across the country, telehealth can help physicians ensure targeted care for everyone.

How telehealth is supporting rural practices’ role as a community center 

The true value of telehealth doesn’t always reveal itself when we’re testing the waters, but rather when the waters test us.

Telehealth helps physicians brace for landfall

How to meet patients wherever they are-and ensure you can get paid for telehealth and virtual check-ins.

Coding for patient care outside the office

If telemedicine is supposed to provide convenient and accessible care, why are so few using these services?

The problem with telemedicine 

The U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory recommending more Americans carry the opioid reversing drug naloxone.

Surgeon General Makes Opioid-Related Recommendation 

Physicians Practice® spoke with Dr. Reena Pande, chief medical officer of AbleTo, about the current standards and challenges physicals are facing with care and access solutions.

Combating "Point Solution Fatigue"

Physicians Practice® spoke with Michael Morgan, at the time the CEO of Updox and a contributor to Physicians Practice, to discuss the new technologies that you should consider implementing in your practice and why implementing a virtual care strategy will be so important post COVID. 

The Paperless Practice: Virtual care strategies

 Continuing our focus on Burnout this month, we are featuring my conversation with Dr. Jonathan Wisen about speciality telemedicine and how it might help reduce increased telehealth burdens reported during the pandemic.

 Dr. Jonathan Wiesen, Founder and Chief Medical Officer of MediOrbis wrote, "Approximately 

 have at least one chronic disease, and 77% have at least two, hence the urgent need to enhance and support the adoption of telemedicine and digital monitoring among Medicaid and Medicare Advantage (MA) patients. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has slowly come around to this realization, and cloud-based telehealth-based remote monitoring programs for managing chronic diseases are now 

A helpful place to start for this particular discussion is to identify what exactly 'specialty telemedicine' is and

 Telemedicine, telehealth, general telemedicine, and specialty telemedicine mean different things to different people. In our company, when we refer to specialty telemedicine, we're describing a mode of telemedicine which is nuanced, which is specific to an area, and which requires a higher level of expertise. That might be specialty telemedicine, much as you think of clinical medical specialists like cardiology questions, nephrology consultations, and endocrine issues; or it may be a very specific area of focus, like chronic disease management, which is which is unique and requires a level of sophistication and expertise. So, general telemedicine has been around for a long time. It's a well-trodden path. But developing very specific and specialized areas of expertise is something that we've been working on many Orbis.

 One area in which specialty telemedicine may increase effectiveness is in chronic care management.

 One of one of the issues in medicine that we've been struggling with for years is the “silo effect”. Physicians, care providers, patients, and technology have all been working in their own individual areas and domains and there hasn't been good integration between them.

Specifically, weight loss programs have been around from time immemorial. I mean, I remember my grandmother, starting a weight loss program, when I was just a few years old. And that had nothing seemingly to do with some of the programs that we're seeing now. But it was very specific, and it wasn't with the recommendation of precision physician, it wasn't integrated into overall clinical care. And so, when you have a specialty telehealth program, led by physicians like we [MediOrbis] do, it improves patients—not just their particular program that they're involved in, but the overall clinical and medical picture, because it's integrated with care providers.

Digital health has been around for quite some time, and especially over the last few years, we've seen great growth in that area. But all too often we find that it's a path to nowhere, and you may get an alert or a notification that something is amiss, but there's no one to really help you manage that. And so, by integrating everything under the auspices of a physician, or a specialist who's trained and knowledgeable in the areas that you're working under, you're able to not just monitor clinical conditions and give recommendations, but actually manage them from a clinical medical standpoint.

 Telemedicine may present new obstacles for physicians, and specialty telemedicine—with its unique focuses—is no different.

 I think that in any area of telemedicine, you encounter obstacles. But the truth of the matter is that in clinical medicine you do as well.

I've been practicing clinical medicine now for 15 years, and I've been in resource-poor environments and resource-poor clinics. And I've also been in some of the top medical institutions in the world. And everywhere that you practice there are components of the care that you deliver that rely on your surroundings and others that you have to realize, “Okay, I don't have access to those particular components and therefore have to function independently of the area that I find myself in.”

Telemedicine is no different. There are some areas of telemedicine of clinical care that are much better with telemedicine. I find that sometimes you can establish a rapport more easily with telemedicine because you're sitting down, you're focused, there's nothing else bothering you. You can you also have to take a great history.

I’m a pulmonary specialist and patients come to me all the time with abnormal CT scans. You know, the first thing they do is they hand you a disc and then you look at it and sometimes I don't even get to hear their story. Whereas with telemedicine, you're forced to encounter the patient, to interact with the patient, create a connection with the patient, hear exactly what's going on, and then make your clinical decisions. There are certain limitations—I'm not standing next to you, I can't do a procedure if it's indicated, and it could be that there are certain diagnostic tests that I would like that I can offer as well. At the same time, I think that there are great benefits as well. And just like in clinical medicine, if you know what you have access to and know what you don't have access to, then you can practice appropriately for the environment that you find yourself in.

 For physicians looking to use telemedicine to treat patients with chronic conditions, Dr. Wisen says that there are three things you should be striving for in your telemedicine program.

 It's really, really important to put together a program that's intuitive, that's intelligent, and that's easy for patients. You know, I actually taught for four years in between undergrad and medical school and I learned from a great mentor that he said: “It's not important what I teach, it's important what the students learn.” And it's the same idea in medicine: what I say is irrelevant, what the patient does is important. If I prescribe a million medications, and they don't take a single one, I've accomplished nothing.

So, we designed a program, where it's engaging, where it's simple, where it can be accessed from any device at any time, where everything is presented with a nice user experience that the patients can easily access it, they can easily ask for help with just the click of a button. They can interact with staff very simply through technology modalities, or any means that they prefer some of the elderly patients prefer to call up call us on the phone, younger patients, we just want to send a text message and be done with it. Whatever your preferences, that's what we want to provide. And again, it's not really important, what I say it's important what the patient does. And we designed all of our chronic disease programs and our clinical programs in the specialty realm with that in mind.

That's really important for all patients to know that having digital health solutions is not sufficient, having just telemedicine is not sufficient, but having a health record that that can pull in all the information from the different components that can pull in all the information from your physicians, and that can present it in a manner that's simple and easy to access is crucial and integral.

So again, EHR, and we won't get into all of my feelings about EHRs in general, but an EHR is supposed to be an electronic modality for managing your care. And to the extent that it does that, it'll be useful and to the extent that it doesn't do that it will not be useful. And that's exactly how we designed ours as well.

Physicians Practice® spoke with Dr. Jonathan Wisen, Founder and Chief Medical Officer of MediOrbis, about specialty telemedicine for the treatment of chronic conditions and how these technologies can improve a practice's offerings and patient outcomes. 

Specialty telemedicine for independent practices

 Happy Holidays everyone! As you recline into your various festivities, feasts, and celebrations, business should be far from your mind.

If you are one of the lucky few who have downtime at this point in this hectic year,

The offices at MJH Life Sciences are closed for the holidays, but we still wanted to bring you our conversation with Elizabeth Woodcock, founder and principal 

 [and an adjunct faculty at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emroy University in Atlanta, Georgia].

A little fun fact about this special guest: she was actually the 'director of knowledge management' at Physician's Practice from 2003-2004. Our contemporary Pearls writers are a direct result of her work—she originally christened our newsletter 'Pearls', and that title has lived on though migrated to our regular expert contributors.

Earlier this year, Elizabeth joined me to answer some questions about telemedicine. Then, the concept was fresh as most practices were attempting to understand and implement these strategies while simultaneously trying treat through these platforms.

Physician's Practice® spoke with Elizabeth Woodcock, founder and Principal of Woodcock and Associates, about what physicians need to know when setting up telehealth services at their practice.

Telemedicine

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