Telehealth and Virtual Visits with TrakCare - An Update

There are many models for delivering EMR-enabled telehealth services, and we are pleased to announce the expansion of our own offering using TrakCare. In an earlier issue of the OnTrak News Flash, we described our initial Skype integration, which was a quick-and-easy way to launch Skype calls in context directly from the patient record. Our expanded telehealth framework is flexible in that it can be deployed with tools other than Skype by a patient providing their personal ID, email address, or phone number.

When making appointments for telehealth consultations, TrakCare users can now store a ‘Meeting Link’ that is unique to the scheduled appointment (for URL-based meeting services). This Meeting Link can be displayed in a column in appointment lists or icon profiles, making it easy for clinicians to connect with the patient.

Another part of the expanded offering is a configurable framework for setting up OAuth servers for authentication using InterSystems IRIS for Health and the API calls required to connect to meeting platforms such as Microsoft Teams or Google Meet.

A proposed standard workflow for telehealth consultations using TrakCare would look like this:

TrakCare customers can control the display of the Meeting Links in the user interface by configuring Time Offsets. In this way, access to the meeting is only possible when the scheduled appointment time approaches.

This new capability provides convenience. More importantly, launching the appointment from TrakCare helps to ensure all clinical documentation, patient orders, or other records that result from an appointment, whether captured in face-to-face or virtual encounters, is consistently available in TrakCare and can be leveraged for decision support and other downstream uses.

This appointment-based approach for telehealth is being deployed in several regions. If you would like to learn more, please contact your local InterSystems TrakCare representative.

^{This story originally appeared the May 26, 2020- OnTrak News Flash No.4: The Fight Against COVID-19 newsletter}