Build an International Healthcare Career – Part II
By Dr. Paul Drouin
Choose a Successful Virtual TeleHealthcare Platform and Stand at the Vanguard of Healthcare!
One of the most significant decisions that a medical or natural medicine doctor will make after graduation is to choose the location of their practice. Will it be in the city or in the country? Some of my colleagues have even considered practicing in other countries. This decision will have an undeniable impact on the focus of your practice and on future socio-economic implications for the entire family.
In fact, in the last two years of my internship, I vividly remember visiting many hospitals and areas, especially in Northern Canada where the need for medical doctors was sometimes critical and hospitals would frequently send delegations to seek new doctors. Today, deciding where to practice requires consideration of new factors since the concept of the location of one’s practice has been redefined by the reality of telehealthcare, which by definition has no borders or specific locality.
The practice of conventional and natural medicine has experienced a radical transformation in the last few decades. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic is a game-changer that has converted many conventional practices into virtual services. According to a news report (1), about 20% of what Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurers spend on outpatient, office, and home-health visits amounts to $250 billion dollars in care, an amount that could shift to telehealth.
Lalita Abhyankar, M.D, wrote: “Nearly overnight on March 16, my massive multispecialty organization shifted from using telemedicine from 15%-20% of patient encounters, to more than 80%.” (2)
Today, the questions for a doctor, health practitioner, or coach choosing a practice location have shifted to, “Where will I establish my virtual telehealth practice? What software platform should I choose for offering my health services?”
These questions need careful consideration, as they will define you as a practitioner and the quality of care that you will be offering in future decades. You can choose to be part of the next trend and generation of successful holistic doctors addressing the future challenges of healthcare, or you can remain on the bandwagon of software platforms that only offer support for a conventional model of medicine.
In the future, major elements of a successful practice will be the prevention and management of risk factors associated with disease.
In fact, A study from the renowned medical journal The Lancet entitled “Health-care spending attributable to modifiable risk factors in the USA” shows “high spending on health care attributable to modifiable risk factors and highlights the need for preventing and controlling risk exposure. These attributable spending estimates can contribute to informed development and implementation of programs to reduce risk exposure, their health burden, and health-care cost.” (3)
The winning virtual telehealth platform will be the one that delivers classes and programs that can improve the client’s lifestyle, decrease risk factors, and give information on how to build resilience and strength through modalities such as yoga, meditation, and behavior modification strategies.
Additionally, critical factors for establishing a successful virtual telehealth practice include much more than simply finding software for collecting lab reports. The Exponential Healthcare platform provides all the essential features needed to succeed:
- Builds Credibility: You may be a doctor, a nurse, or another licensed healthcare professional who needs training in coaching, or you might be an unlicensed health practitioner looking to increase your competence and earn the credentials required for coaching and holistic medicine. In these cases, Exponential Healthcare provides not only an environment for assembling and evaluating information but also an integrated educational platform, which provides complete training and the most recent integration system for setting up a virtual practice. Additionally, when you participate in Exponential Healthcare, Health Coach training is also included in your membership.
- Tracks Health Parameters: The Exponential Healthcare platform provides access not only to basic information from lab reports, but also to the information collected by various commonly-used digital devices (Fitbit, Garmin, MyZone, Apple watch, and HeartMath) through the use of smartphone technologies. These parameters allow the tracking of lifestyle indicators including activities, sleep, even heart rate variability, and many more that are essential to monitoring health potential.
- Provides Feedback: Virtual telehealth coaching without feedback can be compared to being on a weight-loss program without ever getting on the scale. In contrast, innovative digital medicine using smartphone technologies is central to Exponential Healthcare and provides critical knowledge about health potential, which is essential to enhanced monitoring and coaching, as described in a previous blog (4) that highlights the importance of feedback in monitoring health parameters.
- Offers Personal Branding: A few decades ago, hospitals would advertise under the banner of Integrative Medicine to attract new clientele. Today, the Exponential Healthcare platform allows the practitioner to design their own website and personalize their own branding while clearly associating themselves with integrative or holistic medicine, thus indicating that they are caring for their clients holistically.
- Provides Educational Content: A major obstacle for medical or natural medicine doctors is navigating the complexity of finding classes and programs appropriate to their clientele. In fact, when I was practicing holistic medicine for many years in Canada, I would make video materials available to my clients, which they could then view at my clinic or at home. I would create these tools for my clients in order to offer them complementary education about their nutrition and lifestyle. These videos allowed me to teach my clients about healthy diets and new lifestyle habits, thus allowing me to stay in communication with my clients, even in my limited time during the day. The Exponential Healthcare platform offers preloaded educational content and also includes the possibility of offering your own personalized classes to your clients. These extra training sessions or classes can be free of charge or for sale to your clients or groups.
- Democratizes Medicine: In the past, clients (patients) didn’t have access to their own health data and would need to consult their doctor for solutions to their health challenges, who would usually present them with options that were limited to pharmaceutics or surgery. Today the client (patient) has access to their own medical information and wants to be informed about all options. The new phenomenon of the democratization of medicine is already producing clients/patients who will be able to participate much more fully in restoring their own health in the future. In fact, Exponential Healthcare also offers preloaded content (diet, exercise, lifestyle monitoring, digital biofeedback, yoga, meditation, and more), thus broadening the spectrum of options and strategies for a more natural and holistic plan for health.
- Focuses on Health Potential: I wrote in my book, Creative Integrative Medicine (5), that “The tree of medicine must be transplanted into a new soil…” This is what I call Pro-Consciousness Medicine, an approach to medicine based on the basic concepts of quantum physics that addresses health potential rather than disease. In comparison, Exponential Healthcare is in many ways this new soil, an environmental system and a web of information that provides clients a greater awareness, which allows them to be more proactive and to take charge of their own healing journey, thus increasing their resilience as they move forward on this new path.
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References
(1) Henry, T. A. (2022). After COVID-19, $250 billion in care could shift to telehealth. Retrieved from https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/digital/after-covid-19-250-billion-care-could-shift-telehealth
(2) American Academy of Family Physicians. (2022). Telemedicine: The Good, the Bad, the Pleasantly Surprising. AAFP News/Blogs/Fresh Perspectives: New Docs in Practice. Retrieved from https://www.aafp.org/news/blogs/freshperspectives/entry/20200414fp-covidtelemedicine.html
(3) Bolnick, H. J., Bui, A. L., Bulchis, A. Chen, C., Chapin, A. Lomsadze, L., Mokdad, A. H., Millard, F., & Dieleman, J. L. (2020). Health-care spending attributable to modifiable risk factors in the USA: an economic attribution analysis. The Lancet, 5 (10), E525-E535. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30203-6. Retrieved from https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(20)30203-6/fulltext
(4) Drouin, P. (2021). Coaching Health Potential [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://drpauldrouin.com/coaching-health-potential/
(5) Drouin, P. (2014). Creative Integrative Medicine. Independently Published. ISBN-13: 978-1075282577. https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Integrative-Medicine-Medical-Healthcare-ebook/dp/B07TCT6NN6
