Patient Management Solution Provider Azalea Health Reveals Telehealth Usage Surges by More Than 6,500% During COVID-19
Azalea's telehealth solution, offered for free during the pandemic, is a seamless extension of care, streamlining adoption with an intuitive app fully integrated with the patient record.
ATLANTA, June 23, 2020 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Azalea Health, a leading provider of fully cloud-based patient management and billing solutions serving more than 15 million patients, today announced the results of its free telehealth initiative, offered to community-based healthcare providers using Azalea EHR for one year during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Not only did providers take advantage of the offer, sessions increased 68-fold from February to April, representing a 6,500% jump since the initiative was launched in early March, and $2.3M in reimbursements. The trend is not showing any signs of slowdown — telehealth sessions remained 4,000% higher in May compared to February. The fast and widespread adoption of Azalea's telehealth offering points to the promising potential of telehealth as the new staple of patient care — expanding the reach of care teams, enabling higher utilization, and unlocking a strong path to revenue recovery.
Providers have been using Azalea's telehealth app to support a wide range of clinical activities, including managing chronic illness, performing wellness checks, providing medication management for OB/GYN patients, ensuring continuity of behavioral health services for high-risk youth, and extending the reach of their care teams.
"We could not be more proud to provide a critical telehealth service to our growing network of providers, just in time to help them continue to serve their patient communities through this unprecedented crisis," said Baha Zeidan, Azalea Health CEO. "Our ability to pivot quickly is part of our DNA; this agility is inherent to our cloud-based infrastructure. As telehealth becomes the new standard, we're excited to offer it to providers and patients as part of a holistic care management solution, tightly integrated with our 'one patient, one record' approach to EMR and flexible billing system. Providers are using this to not only bridge the gap to revenue recovery, but also to build towards a vibrant practice of the future."
A recent report from McKinsey found that 76% of patients were interested in using telehealth going forward, up from 11% before COVID-19, while 56% of providers view telehealth more favorably than they did before the pandemic. The shift to telehealth has been especially vital for rural health clinics (RHCs), 51% of which did not have any telehealth services in 2018. Health centers are now seeing just 63% of their patient volume before the pandemic, forcing over 1,700 of them to temporarily close. Telehealth is now enabling care continuity for the vulnerable populations that rely on these RHCs for their healthcare.
"This pandemic opened the door for telehealth, and now it's unlikely that door will ever close again," noted rural healthcare consultant Mark Lynn. "Now that the regulatory hurdles have been cleared and evidence of success emerges, providers are starting to see telehealth as a long-term solution. Patients are expecting touch-free and remote care options, and with patient volumes still below pre-COVID levels, telehealth will be critical to stabilizing revenue. It can also help patients reach specialists they would never have had access to before."
Azalea's telehealth offering is an agile, intuitive end-to-end solution that streamlines the remote patient care workflow and integrates it with the patient record for a seamless extension of care. It comes fully integrated with electronic prescribing capabilities and a patient portal that delivers access to patient records, appointment scheduling, messaging and payment options. With the familiar look, feel and functionality of an app, providers and patients can spend less time learning how the technology works and more time on the clinical visit. And although patient privacy rules for telehealth have relaxed during the crisis, Azalea's telehealth offering is fully HIPAA-compliant.
"We were looking at telehealth as a way to augment the services that we offer to our patients long before the current COVID-19 crisis," said Omar L. Caban, MD, MBA, president at Phycinity PLLC, a pediatric provider delivering services in the greater Raleigh, North Carolina area. "What the pandemic did was reduce the regulatory and payer-related barriers to payment standing in the way of revenue and a truly profitable model for remote care. Azalea Health has done a great job of enabling our practice through their telehealth technology. Having a fully HIPAA-compliant, integrated telehealth solution that is easy to use and deploy has empowered my staff and patient community with the tools to ensure excellence of care is the hallmark of our practice."
About Azalea Health:
Azalea Health (Azalea) is changing the way health IT platforms connect community-based healthcare providers and patients across the care continuum. Offering a 100% cloud-based, interoperable solution, Azalea delivers electronic health records, revenue cycle management, and telehealth services designed for rural, community and urban practices and hospitals, especially those focused on underserved populations. Quick to deploy and intuitive to use, Azalea solutions ensure better care coordination and communication, and the "one patient, one record" approach provides care teams the agility to achieve better outcomes. The Azalea platform also delivers tools and resources to help providers meet their Meaningful Use requirements, and informs their strategies to navigate accountable care and alternative payment models. For more information, visit http://www.azaleahealth.com.
Azalea PR Contact:
Lexi Herosian
[email protected]
SOURCE Azalea Health
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