As the country slowly transitions towards a digital healthcare ecosystem, your willingness to partake in that journey and successfully add greater value to your practice through online consultations is admirable. In this climate, it is heartening to see how well your patients have also adapted to virtual consultations, especially using video as one of the mediums.
In offering your expertise and knowledge through video, you have made it possible for patients to get a clinic-like experience from the comfort and safety of their homes. In fact, video consultations have emerged as the preferred choice among them, with over 84% preferring that over audio or chat-based consultations.
Today, anybody booking a consultation with Practo is eligible to request for a video call. While it is true that many choose video for the superior experience it offers, some do it out of necessity for a variety of reasons – they may either be uncomfortable typing long sentences or face language barriers in effectively communicating in English by chat.
This may explain why some patients demand refunds when their requests for video consultations go unanswered.
Why you should accept video consultation requests from patients
Given that we may have to offer full refunds to patients in case their specific request for a video consultation is not met, we encourage you to accede to their requests to give them the care they seek.
While we understand that there could be occasional instances where you may not be able to accept video requests, our records show that some doctors routinely refuse video consultations to patients despite their requests.
As we try to give our users the best possible online consulting experience, such a pattern has prompted us to consider disabling online consultation option – albeit temporarily – for profiles that deny a high number of video consultation requests from patients.
In other words, in all cases where patients request for a video consultation, we expect doctors to ensure the consultation happens through video only, and that continued non-adherence can result in the consultation option being temporarily disabled for their profile.
You can also check if a video was requested by a patient on the launch video screen that appears at the start of a consultation, with the label ‘Patient has requested a video call’.
How video helps you deliver best online consultation experience
We, thus, hope that you will include more video consultations in your practice in the future and maximise its benefits, which are many.
Video consultations help:
- Deliver an experience closest to in-clinic consultation
- Understand issues better to offer appropriate diagnosis
- Enable synchronous & real-time conversations with patients
- Build greater trust & transparency with patients
- Save 50% more time than chat-based consultations
- Remain compliant with telemedicine guidelines & standards
Thus, the benefits of integrating video consultations with your daily practice is numerous. With that, we hope you discover the merits of video as a medium of consultation, and hence, offer more of those in the future.