Unified communications technology is just getting started. One way that it is changing the game is through telemedicine.
Throughout history, doctors primarily administered medicine via the house call. The house call was a good way to attend to the urgent but not emergency situation such as stomach pain, fever, cuts needing stitches, and the like. It also was a good way to serve elderly patients who have multiple conditions.
Such urgent care cases account for roughly 40 percent of the nearly 130 million annual emergency room visits.
Home visits have largely disappeared since the 1980s, however. Whereas they accounted for 40 percent of physician interactions in the 1930s, the number had dropped to about 1 percent by 1980.
Telemedicine is bringing back the home visit, and healthcare administrators are finding that it can be used for more than just virtual doctor visits—it also can have application for healthcare training programs that can be administered by contact center staff that are geographically dispersed due to specialized training but can be unified by a virtual contact center environment.
Studies have shown that primary care visits can decrease hospitalization rates by more than 60 percent and save around 25 percent in total costs, according to a recent article in the New York Times. But there are other applications, too, like helping families who care for autistic children.
The Learning to Live with Autism program, for instance, offers behavior training for parents via telemedicine. A partnership between the State of Florida's Agency for Persons with Disabilities and the Harper Family Charitable Foundation, and developed by the Scott Center, the program delivers real-time face-to-face training that gives parents the skills, tools and techniques they can use to reduce problem behavior and increase adaptive skills, appropriate verbal behavior and social interaction.
The pilot program, which took place this past summer, focused on 30 underserved families from throughout Florida and gave them 10 weeks of free behavioral training via Adobe (News - Alert) Connect.
"If you have a child with disabilities, it can be very difficult to leave your house," said Ivy Chong, director of autism services and training at Florida Institute of Technology's Scott Center for Autism Treatment. “There is a lot of need for early diagnosis and for reducing barriers to treatment. This is one way we can approach it.”
The families in the program seemed to love it, too.
“Having a child with autism, plus a job, a husband that travels 90 percent of the month, another child and lots of therapies and activities, the idea of getting one-on-one time with a behavior analyst without leaving the house was really interesting,” explained Arwyn Holmes, who has a five-year-old son with autism. “Having the presentation online made it significantly easier.”
The benefits of unified communications and virtual call center environments are still making themselves known, but one definite benefit is the return of the house call.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey