The Health Care Professional’s Guide to Successful Telehealth Program Development is a blog series that provides a step-by-step approach to telehealth program development.
Click here to access the blog series and step-by-step checklist.
Delivering health services beyond the boundaries of a brick and mortar building is innovative; however, offering health services via telehealth/telemedicine requires organizational change.
Now that you know that your organization can benefit from a telehealth program, assessing your organization’s ability and willingness to change how the business operates and how services are offered should be done before a program is implemented. Your organization should be willing to embrace the changes required to offer new services and share a collective understanding of the expected goals and outcomes of the program.
Ensuring that your organization is ready to offer new telehealth/telemedicine services is critical to your success!
How do you know if your organization is ready?
Assessing your organization’s readiness does not necessarily require a lot of time. Depending on the size of your organization, you may be able to assess by reviewing checklists and meeting with team members. Larger organizations may require a more in depth approach and a documented plan. Either way, once you have determined that your organization is ready to take on the challenges, you will be ready to to move forward with developing your program.
If you determine that your organization is not ready to move forward, the information that you collected during your assessment will help you identify the areas that require work before moving forward with your plans.
Use the resources section below to guide you through the assessment process and to customize your own assessment plan.
What do you need to know?
- Assessing organizational readiness is an evaluation to ensure that your organization has the ability and willingness to change how business operates and how services are offered
- Taking time to assess organizational readiness allows you to identify critical gaps/potential problems and address them prior to implementing your program
- Experts estimate that 50% of all change efforts fail because leaders do not sufficiently assess organizational readiness for change
What do you need to consider?
- What telehealth/telemedicine services should we offer?
- Would the new services fit within our organization’s mission, strategic plan, values, and culture?
- How would a new program impact current operations?
- Does my organization have the technology needed to be successful?
- Do we have a program champion, an advocate who is open to change and able to obtain financial, technical and personnel support?
- Who would be a member of the team and what role would he/she play?
- What are the potential opportunities, strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and barriers to implementing the program?
- How would we measure program success?
What do you need to do?
- Identify similar programs that you can benchmark, which can save time and provide useful data
- Organize and document results to get a clear picture and a detail-driven plan
Resources to get you started!
- Building Your Telehealth Team (Course Module)
- Telehealth Readiness Factors: What Are They and Why Are They Essential?
- Assessing Organizational Readiness: Is Your Organization Ready for Telemedicine?
- Best Practices for Telehealth Programs: Lessons from the Field
- National Telehealth Resource Center Program Development Guides
