Continuous secure chat between ensures broadening screen care

Keeping healthcare affordable has led to a massive digitisation drive in the healthcare sector. Hospitals, clinics and other healthcare providers have started taking advantage of the opportunities offered by digital healthcare providers en masse. In the pandemic, screen-based care ensured that care could continue online. With rising costs, it now also appears to be the answer to keeping care affordable.

 Keeping care affordable has led to a huge digitisation drive in the healthcare sector. Hospitals, clinics and other healthcare providers have started using the possibilities offered by digital healthcare providers en masse. In the pandemic, screen-based care ensured that care could continue online. With rising costs, it now also appears to be the answer to keeping care affordable.

Digital healthcare platform Webcamconsult is seeing an increase in the needs of practitioners and healthcare consumers. The screen care specialist is adding the ability to chat and app to its healthcare communication platform at any time of the day. In particular, patients requiring long-term care feel the need to easily consult their practitioner via chat. Telephone contact and contact online (video consultations) are already widely used in healthcare. In addition to these digital means of communication, an ongoing secure chat option has now been added by Webcamconsult. Due to the increase in healthcare costs, many healthcare organisations are looking for (digital) opportunities to reduce costs.

This is the first time that a new system has been introduced.

Increasing healthcare costs and overstrained healthcare market

An increase in healthcare costs is expected to be 6.3% in 2022 compared to 2021. The prognosis model of care and welfare shows that the shortage of care workers will increase from 49 thousand in 2022 to around 117 thousand people in 2030. Health insurer VGZ  indicates in their policy that e-health plays an important role in keeping care properly affordable and available. Also CZ and other health insurers indicate they want to apply more digital care.
Suppliers to the healthcare market play a major role in keeping good care affordable by offering support services and resources.

Bert van Gerwen, CEO Webcamconsult: "We have been developing digital care since 2013. With the changing healthcare landscape in recent years, e-health has gained tremendous momentum. Compare this a bit to the early days of e-commerce. Now that we are also outgrowing its infancy in the healthcare IT sector, we see that applications are developing at lightning speed based on market experience and demand. For example, our relations expressed a need for a simple continuous chat function, and this has now been developed and implemented.
Healthcare must be and remain affordable and accessible to healthcare consumers. But systems must also meet the needs of practitioners, otherwise they will not be used. In the background, a system can be enormously complex, but the patient and healthcare provider should not notice that at the front end."

Digital care full-fledged replacement for physical care?

According to CTO and co-founder of Webcamconsult Milan Tjioe, also working as a dermatologist at Bravis Hospital, digital healthcare has developed at lightning speed. Tjioe: "The healthcare sector is a fairly traditional industry in which implementation of digital care was not tremendously fast. Until Covid. After that, that mindset changed completely. Only you see that both patients, and doctors, but also the application suppliers need time to fully embrace it. GPs still hardly use screen-based care, for instance.
We are implementing a continuous chat option because it is convenient to be able to communicate with each other via text before, during or after a video consultation. This allows an assistant to ask some questions beforehand or the patient to raise something he or she forgot to ask afterwards. Departments determine indiviually who has which rights in handling these online conversations.
Our goal is to make e-health so accessible that it can compete with physical care. A physical examination will remain physical for now, but follow-up appointments or an exploratory conversation can often be handled digitally just fine. Blended care is a bit of the buzzword at the moment, but is also the reality that is playing out in healthcare right now."

Introducing client app

With the further development of the Webcamconsult platform, a client app will also be released. This will allow patients to use the continuous chat function. The design of the app takes into account less digitally proficient clients, making digital care accessible to a broad target group. Click here for more information.