Blog

Ensuring security and confidentiality of patient data has always been a legal requirement for health professionals. With the health industry’s rapid shift to telehealth, this principle remains unchanged. As we introduce video consultations to our practice, the selection of a safe and secure video platform is therefore paramount.   Why is platform quality important?  …

These are the journal articles on telehealth in physiotherapy that i have collected over the years. Please note that these articles are all Physiotherapy telehealth specific, and don’t cover other allied health professions. If you create one for another health profession, please share it with me. This is a live table, so it is always…

In this interview with Peter Birch on the Talking HealthTech podcast, I reflect on the rise of telehealth in allied health, the technology needed to be an effective Telehealth provider, the funding for Telehealth, and some hot tips for aspiring entrepreneurs about what makes a stand out Telehealth platform.

  On Tuesday 9th of July, software engineer and tech journalist Jonathan Leitschuh published an article on tech blog Medium outlining a security vulnerability he had uncovered within the Zoom video conferencing system. Zoom responded to the disclosure on the same day, and has since released updates that they state will address the issue. I…

What is a VPN, and what is the potential role of a VPN in telehealth? There is currently poor clarity regarding how therapist and client location affects professional regulations in digital practice. In these discussions, the concept of VPN usage is commonly introduced. So what exactly is it? VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. A…

  Have you been toying with the idea of transitioning your health service to the online space? Are you wondering how to get started with telehealth? One of the most common questions that I get asked by health professionals regarding digital practice is simply how to get started. So in this post I will give…

I spent the last 2 days attending the Australian Telehealth Conference in Brisbane. The conference format, venue and teabag selection were nothing innovative. However the sessions were, on the most part, heartwarming stories of successful digital practice rolled out across a huge range of settings. The value of these gatherings is often in the identification…

  Are you confused about your obligations for maintaining data security in digital practice? When you start researching tech platforms to use for telehealth, you rapidly get hit by a tsunami of acronyms such as HIPAA, BAAs, GDPR, OAIC and PIPEDA. There’s a lot more to data security in digital practice than perhaps you initially…

  Are you struggling to set up your digital practice workflow? Payment gateways. Intake forms. Appointment bookings. Screening questions. It is easy to be confused about all of the different steps in a telehealth consultation, and what order they should all go in. This post is designed to get you thinking about the different components…

How To Market Your Telehealth Service It doesn’t matter how good your online consultation process is, if you don’t know how to market your telehealth business, you will struggle to get patients through the virtual door. Branding and marketing are therefore some of the most crucial components to any successful digital health practice. From logos…

As the online consultation concept grows within the healthcare industry, regulators are battling to keep up with appropriate guidelines. As is often the case with new treatment techniques or approaches, the practice out paces the regulation. Some agencies that police the quality and complaints of health services feel the need to limit the geographical reach…

To create an entire telehealth experience for your patients, you have most likely combined a number of tech systems together. From completing forms, to making a payment, from scheduling appointments to conducting a video call. It is important to ensure that the end-to-end experience is as frictionless as possible for both you and your patient.…

In a face-to-face clinic, you do a few things to prepare the room before a consultation. You clean your treatment couch, fold the towels, put the tape scraps in the rubbish and chew on a mint. So what about preparing for a telehealth video call?   Although your stinky onion breath may no longer be…

Are you getting started with digital consultations and wondering what telehealth video platform to use?   Over the past 6 years running Online.Physio, I have trialed many different video platforms for patient appointments. As you can imagine, the technology is growing and changing rapidly, with new platforms hitting the market almost daily. Rather than naming…

When I decided to develop Online Physio, I had already paid a hefty deposit to a website developer before I had a sudden thought:   ‘Geez, I had better check if there is any evidence showing that telehealth actually works’.   It was not my finest moment of planning.   Fortunately for me, the resultant…

When I started doing online physiotherapy consultations in 2011, all I had was a simple website and a skype account. The way that I conduct online Physiotherapy consultations has changed a lot since then. I often get asked by other health professionals how I actually ‘do’ online Physiotherapy consultations, so I thought I would share…

  Last week i had a thought leader within the Physio profession present a controversial question for my thoughts: Is telehealth destroying the health profession? This was my response: I completely understand the hesitation that Physiotherapists feel when faced with the treat of digitised consultations, bereft from physical touch. I felt the same way when…

  Gone are the days when all we did was wait for a patient to walk through the front door or phone the clinic.   Technology has given us amazing opportunities to be present for our potential patient before they have even decided to see a health professional.   If we can plant the seed…

I wanted to jump out of my seat and scream…or lie on the floor and have a tanty like a 5 year old.   It was the end of a long day at an Allied Health Conference, and my expectations of the day had been left well and truly unmet.   Why?   Because in…

Health professionals who prescribe exercise programs have, for many years, scribbled stick figures on a piece of paper to hand to their patients.   Are you one of them? I used to be too.   A few computer based exercise prescription programs have traditionally been on the market, and for those who trialled them, those…

I was watching my favorite TV show the other night – Shark Tank. It’s where entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a panel for potential investment. The best pitch of the night was from the two smart, savvy founders of the Glamazon App. This app allows people to instantly search for providers of a particular…

When I upgraded my iPhone to a bigger one, I wasn’t sure how it would impact my life. Would I need to buy clothes with bigger pockets? Would I need to buy a new range of handbags? (Any excuse…) What I found was this: I suddenly started using apps and functionality that has always been…

Burn out can be defined as ‘fatigue, frustration, or apathy resulting from prolonged stress, overwork or intense activity.’ (Official source: the Dictionary app in my iphone). Even before I graduated as a Physiotherapist, I was told in one of my University classes that I was likely to burn out. I hadn’t worked a day in…

Thanks to technology, the ways that we communicate, shop and access services have changed dramatically over the past decade. As consumers, we are continually demanding more ways to make contact with our favorite brands and services. As health professionals, we need to be aware of how this impacts how our patients contact us.   Many…

I recently wrote a blog post about 5 skills that I feel health business owners require that don’t get taught at Uni. The 5 points basically revolved around sales and marketing, and were born from the fact that as health professionals, we are not always great at marketing ourselves and getting our message out into…

  A quick search of any health ailment on You Tube will instantly reveal many thousands of videos that have been made by health professionals world wide. So why should you create even more video content to add to the pile? People trust the health professional that they have developed a connection with, and technology now…

Often before deciding to make an appointment to see a health professional, people are googling questions about their injury or condition online. If you can create content to match these questions, these potential patients will find you. They may want to read more about you and what you do, and then ultimately will decide to…

Ahhh, those wonderful Uni days of beer and pizza lunches, evening pub crawls and breakfast hangovers. Oh, and study too of course. Loads of study. When you think back to what you learned at Uni, you probably remember learning anatomy, studying various conditions, and practicing interventions and treatments. All of that knowledge has no doubt…

From my experiences scouring the globe for tech trends and how they apply to the health industry, I want to share with you the top 5 digital tech trends that health professionals need to be looking out for in 2017.   1) Virtual and Augmented Reality Virtual reality is conveyed within a digital headset, where…

I couldn’t believe my eyes. I was witnessing a paraplegic person walk again. I viewed this amazing moment in a video shown by a fellow presenter at the International Society of Digital Medicine conference in Nanjing, China. A robot exoskeleton was wrapped around the body of the paraplegic person, and they were walking with crutches…

Have you heard of the concept of ‘bedside manner’? The term hails originally from the health industry, where it referred to the personal skills that a doctor required to communicate with their patient. The term can, however, be applied in a business sense to refer to how we communicate with our customers in a transaction…

Let me start by saying that on the whole, I love the health industry. We are caring, we are motivated and in many cases, we literally save lives. Becoming involved with entrepreneurs across wide a range of areas, however, has given me a unique birds eye view of how different industries are moving and changing…

I was recently at a pre-conference dinner, where I met a fellow speaker. After we exchanged pleasantries, she stared me straight in the eye and said “So, are you published?”. I wanted to tell her proudly about my book, my half a dozen booklets, my white paper, impressive website copy and growing pile of blog…

  As a female in my late 30’s, I can honestly say I have never felt so much as the smallest desire to have and raise children. I’m married to the man of my dreams, have financial security and my friends are all having kids, but no cell in my body wants my own child.…

Today my business headquarters is a café in Shanghai, China. An international conference invitation brought me to this amazing country and it’s a long way from my native Melbourne, Australia. As a result, today I have a whole day to be doing something at the very top of my ‘Reasons Why I Love Being An…

I grew up as a ballerina, I trained as a health professional, and I have led health and fitness programs all my life. I have always prided myself on my fit and active lifestyle. That is, until January this year, when I pulled on my boardshorts for an afternoon of stand up paddle boarding. Oooooeee…

So there I was one dreary Melbourne afternoon, lining up for a coffee. The lady in front of me was discussing her back injury with a girlfriend, so I did what any responsible health professional would do. I eavesdropped. “So do you know what is wrong with your back then?” the supportive friend asked. “Dunno,…

Are there days in your business life that you feel like a broken record? Are you sick of answering the same types of emails, telling the same stories to your clients, giving the same training to new team members, or re-teaching the same procedures? As a health professional, I used to see clients (patients) one…

There I was, in the midst of a bone chilling Melbourne winter, propped up in bed under some toasty blankets with my laptop on my knees. As I hit ‘send’ on a message for a patient that I was treating online, I couldn’t help but chuckle. I was, quite literally, treating a patient in my…