Why technical support is an important part of virtual health care.

For most of us, seeing a health care professional meant booking an appointment over the phone, driving down to a grey and boring clinic, sitting in an eerie waiting room, and waiting for our name to be called. A dry experience and system we grew up with, and to an extent learned to accept the lack of innovation. Paper patient charts, fax machines, and business phone lines. The world around us seemed to be moving quicker than the health care industry could catch up with, until the last year that is. With the COVID-19 pandemic putting a halt to all in person gatherings healthcare organizations especially, had to adapt quickly through the adoption of virtual care programs.

Each and every day the amount of virtual care appointments continues to sky rocket. From your local family doctor and therapist, to an entire health care organization, virtual care in most cases is the only safe and accessible way for health care professionals to continue seeing their patients. Although the rapid innovation can be exciting, for an industry stuck in 2002 there can be a unique set of challenges.

Allow me to shed some light on these challenges for you. Most recently, I've been trying to teach my mother how to use FaceTime on her iPad. As many times as I walked her through, when the time came for her to make an outgoing call, she never quite seemed to get the instructions right. But, after taking the time to write down the steps in an easy to understand way she was able to use the app with ease, and further actually scrap the written steps.

Should my mom have been accessing online virtual care, I can almost say with certainty she would at some point require a level of support and coaching to ensure her success. This is one key area where empathetic technical support becomes incredibly vital to a patients experience with online care. Further, with such a wide range of devices, internet connections, and levels of tech savviness it's important for technical support to be agile while accounting for these unique variables.

Now what about the health care professionals who will be powering these virtual care experiences? As mentioned earlier, this is an industry that just a year ago was equipped with fax machines, dial up internet, and landlines. This is where a knowledgeable, understanding, and robust tech support team becomes critical to creating a seamless patient to provider interaction. This requires a deep understanding of technology and health care infrastructure to ensure a successful transition to virtual care.

At OnCall Health, a phenomenal support experience has been a key component of our customer's success. In being apart of scaling the customer experience, I've taken it upon myself to understand the challenges from both ends of the call. A main focus of our team has not only been to deliver quality customer support, but educate and create self sufficient virtual care champions. Through the creation of training documentation, videos, and building a powerful self service chat bot. Patience, empathy, and continuous innovation are a core value of our technical support team, and these values and approach have built a strong and healthy foundation for the future of virtual care.

To conclude, in a market that serves such a vast demographic, having a client experience that pushes clients to success is not just important it's vital. As virtual care continues to scale across the globe technical support must scale along side as a partner to health care enterprises and practitioners alike. Because in most cases, tech support will act to bridge the gap between patient and provider, ensuring both parties are able to facilitate and access care with ease.