Telehealth software bridges the gap between patients and providers, making high-quality professional treatment possible where it hasn’t existed before.
If you’re new to the concept of working with clients online, this guide gives you an overview of how telehealth and digital psychology work, and how you can offer your services remotely to help others live healthier lives.
Telehealth Digital Solutions in Mental Health
Telehealth is the provision of medical and mental healthcare using information technologies, using high-speed telecommunications systems.[1] Over the past ten years, it has become an established way to connect patients to essential services such as therapy, counseling, and psychiatry without face-to-face interactions, using channels such as videoconferencing, instant messaging, VOIP, and other wireless communications.
Telehealth digital solutions can help mental health patients receive the care they need, wherever they are, when they need it most.
By enabling easier and often more affordable access to mental health professionals, telehealth digital solutions can help patients receive the care they need, wherever they are, when they need it most.
There are more than a few digital solutions that work to enable telehealth, including but not limited to:[2][3]
- Store and Forward’ solutions – which capture, store, and send patient data for asynchronous treatment (e.g. MRIs or CAT scans)
- Remote patient monitoring (RPM) technology – e.g. wearable fitness trackers, glucose or heart rate monitors
- Health Information Technology (HIT) – such as Electronic Medical Records (EMRs)
- Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) – e.g. care management or treatment planning software
- mHealth technology – such as mobile mental health apps, and
- Teletherapy – psychotherapy, counseling, or mental health consultations conducted online.
Mental health treatment can be successfully delivered using all these technologies, with teletherapy being an increasingly popular way to help individuals seeking professional help for behavioral or mental health challenges.
How Does Telehealth Therapy Work?
There are a few ways to deliver therapy online, but broadly, a mental health professional will utilize the very same evidence-based solutions that make conventional therapy effective.
Practically, it comes down to finding the ideal mix of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ components to establish a teletherapy or e-therapy treatment that works for both the patient and their provider.
In telehealth, therapy may take the following two formats:
- Online therapy – Here, a patient’s entire mental health treatment is conducted online using a synchronous or asynchronous approach (real-time vs. time-delayed)
- Blended therapy or counseling – Where online, remote, or digital therapy is combined with offline or face-to-face treatment.
Online components of a teletherapy program generally involve sessions with a patient and their professional therapist, and might follow a standardized approach of intake, assessments, and talk therapy.
Just as with regular mental health treatment, psychologists may provide their clients with therapy exercises such as worksheets, video meditations, journals or habit trackers, and other practical activities.
6 Things To Look For In Telehealth Software Systems
A key part of moving into teletherapy is deciding how best to adapt your approach to a virtual medium, which is where telehealth software systems become essential.
To turn evidence-based therapy worksheets, reading materials, and other psychology activities into an interactive digital format, most modern providers use dedicated therapy platforms that are designed for the purpose. If you’re a practitioner thinking about moving into online therapy, the specific software you’ll require will depend on how you plan to treat others, and what tools will be most effective to have at hand.
A good rule of thumb is to look for HIPAA-compliant telehealth software that enables you to:
- Build strong therapeutic rapport with your clients
- Design and share your solutions
- Put treatment plans together
- Monitor your patients’ progress
- Create and organize your psychotherapy notes efficiently and effectively, and
- Share your telemental health solutions with clients in a way that’s organized, accessible, private, secure, and convenient.
For this, you’ll need:
- A HIPAA-compliant chat feature: Such as Quenza Chat, so that you can answer questions, touch base between sessions, offer feedback and keep your conversations secure
- Tools for creating online resources: E.g. Quenza’s Activity Builder, which helps you combine videos, mp3s, text boxes, drop-down menus, and more into your internet-based interventions
- Treatment planning tools: Quenza’s Pathway Tool is a good example of a telehealth feature that lets you curate activities into care pathways or mental health coaching programs
- A platform for data collection: So that you can gather your patients’ assessment results, completed forms, and their responses to your activities
- Note-taking or documentation tools: Like Quenza’s Client Notes for individual patients and group participants, and
- A HIPAA-compliant client-facing app: That acts as a portal where your clients can interact with your therapeutic materials.
Best HIPAA-compliant Platform To Consider
It’s precisely because telehealth is so effective, convenient, and cost-effective that there are so many providers now offer their services digitally.
If you’re considering practicing online, there is one main way to stand out in a crowded marketplace of telehealth providers: differentiation.
Quenza’s GDPR- and HIPAA-compliant online platform is a state-of-the-art solution for digital practitioners who want to deliver unique, professional solutions by designing or customizing their own telehealth resources, easily and efficiently.
With Quenza, you have tools that go beyond vanilla practice management and offer personalized, practice-branded, and endlessly scalable mental health solutions.
6 Features Included In Quenza Software
With Quenza, you’re fully equipped with easy-to-use tools for creating endlessly customizable activities, programs, and telehealth forms. Not only can you design bespoke mental health solutions, but you can share them with your clients conveniently in an engaging way under your own practice brand.
In addition to the Quenza tools we’ve mentioned, the one-of-a-kind features that you’ll find in Quenza include:
- A huge Expansion Library of modifiable treatment and therapy templates, with metaphors, lessons, meditations, activities, evaluations, and therapy forms to reduce your prep time
- The Wheel of Life Feature – For creating clients self-assessments, such as Life Domain Satisfaction activities or Wheel of Life exercises with custom labels, questions, and scales
- A Group Therapy and Coaching Feature – Allowing you to treat groups, teams, or cohorts of up to 50 participants at once, export results, create group notes and communicate with all your participants
- Quenza’s White Label Feature – A convenient way to brand and promote your materials with your custom logo and send emails from your own address
- Multilingual and custom color options for Quenza’s client app, so that you can offer a personalized, practice-branded patient experience through your clients’ smartphone app, and
- Quenza’s professional community, which gives you convenient access to in-app forums where you can interact with your fellow telehealth practitioners, share ideas, and get the answers to your questions.
One of the best things about Quenza is that it’s continuously being refined and expanded based on feedback from the community. To learn more about what’s coming soon, check out our Roadmap!
A Look At Videoconferencing in Telehealth
Videoconferencing is one of the main ways for telehealth practitioners to provide synchronous, or ‘real-time’ mental healthcare services remotely.
While mental health providers may use live, two-way calls with clients for a variety of reasons, they are largely employed to enable the conversations that typically take place in face-to-face sessions when these are not convenient or possible.
Because personal, confidential information is shared during teletherapy sessions, it’s essential that all telehealth videoconferencing calls take place using a HIPAA-compliant platform.
Telehealth software such as Quenza is encrypted to secure Protected Health Information (PHI) in accordance with the requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, and videoconferencing is an upcoming feature of the platform in Q1 of 2022.
If you’re looking for a secure, private, GDPR- and HIPAA-compliant way to offer your teletherapy services to clients, watch this space!
Final Thoughts
There are myriad ways to help clients remotely, and very little to lose by dipping your toe in. If you’re already delivering therapy, mental health coaching, or counseling the traditional way, one of the first steps you can take is to try out a reputable HIPAA-compliant telehealth software solution.
You’ll soon be designing solutions, sharing them with clients, and growing a profitable online practice for the future.
We hope this review helped you. Don’t forget to unlock your $1, 30-day trial of Quenza.
With unlimited access to Quenza’s professional tools, you can deliver top-quality, personalized telehealth solutions more effectively and efficiently, allowing you to improve your patients’ health in even more ways.
References
- ^ Bokolo, A. (2021). Implications of telehealth and digital care solutions during COVID-19 pandemic: a qualitative literature review. Informatics for Health and Social Care, 46(1), 68-83.
- ^ Catalyst, N. (2018). What is telehealth? NEJM Catalyst, 4(1).
- ^ FDA. (2020). What is Digital Health? Retrieved from https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/digital-health-center-excellence/what-digital-health
