Telemedicine Advances Quality of Care at St. Mary's Medical Centre - Research Paper

Introduction

St. Mary's medical centre is an organization that offers acute care, surgical, pediatric, trauma obstetrical, and emergency services for the patients. This organization has specialized programs that ensure quality service delivery. The effectiveness of telemedicine in healthcare has contributed to advancement in the quality of healthcare services offered y St. Mary's medical centre. Implementation of telehealth has helped in reducing barriers preventing access to some of the complex medical conditions; it is important to ensure that telemedicine continues to deliver quality services and enhance effectiveness in medical operations for the people. The implications of this method are designed to that clients get access to high-quality Medicare while striving to attain optimal protection of the client's safety and privacy (Burke, & Hall, 2015). Telemedicine provides the opportunity to reduce healthcare expenses and expand the market for this organization. Enhancing the access for medical care through telemedicine is an important strategy to help in addressing everyday challenges in healthcare, it an improvement that the organization has made to ensure that it is a brand name in the market is maintained to expand market territories. This paper, therefore, describes the implementation of telehealth in St. Mary's medical center, including market competition and marketing strategies as the new telehealth strategy.

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Background

Telemedicine comprises the application of advanced telecommunication and information and communication technology to provide healthcare services and share information, provide education for the public as well as improved administrative services. Telemedicine is a broad term that consists of various digital healthcare technologies that involve the use of a robot and other computer technologies to receive information from the clients. The doctors can analyze the information and provide treatment recommendations remotely. Based on this technology, St. Mary's is leading the way. Patients can monitor their health conditions and send the information to St. Mary's healthcare centre; this technology is accurate, fast, and easy to use. St. Mary's medical centre use telemedicine program to interact with patients, physicians from other medical facilities at any time through wireless or internet connection. It is known as a Stroke treatment centre.

Benefits of Telehealth

Telemedicine is the new method of enhancing care and delivery of healthcare services; it has a potential to help in changing the system of healthcare, reduce hospitalization cost, transport issues and increase convenience and access of quality patient-centeredness operations as well as ensuring patient's satisfaction. Vulnerable patients with complex conditions such as cardiovascular disease and stroke and other health conditions can significantly benefit from the implementation of this method (Gellis, & Kenaley, 2017). Issues of geographical location, chronic advance conditions, and physical disabilities may not be of great challenge. Application of telehealth services will transform Medicare practices. Telemedicine in this organization is a balancing incentive strategy that is expected to monitor patients remotely and providing solutions to reduce cases of avoidable hospitalizations. St. Mary's medical centre is the largest organization providing post-acute care services for children as well as adults. It has improved medical care for patients who enjoy these services at home through remote patient monitoring strategy. Other major benefits of this program are the increase adherence of medication, reduction of hospitalization bills, increased and overall family o patient satisfaction. Patients can receive monitoring services through an interactive voice response (IVR) system (Young, Gupta, & Palacios, 2018). This program inquires for the patient's medication adherence, occurrences of critical medical events, emergency room visits, and general changes in the condition. The frequent calls that are made provide more opportunities for the hospital to enhance communication and promote the proper collection of information; therefore, it helps to identify areas of potential risks.

In contrast to the traditional rehabilitation and nursing care services, this program offered by other organizations, this method ensures medical practitioners receive information from the patient regardless of their geographical location. Doctors can generate reports and call for immediate outreach remotely (Young, Gupta, & Palacios, 2018). This program outcompetes the existing methods of Medicare since patient are required to go to the hospital even in cases of conditions which do to require hospitalization. Telemedicine saves money as compared to the existing programs as well as those that are run by other organizations making it a unique way of offering services to customers. Based on Stroke treatment patients benefits from real-time consultation with neurologists, convenient access to accredited Stroke system as well as its resources, Stroke awareness, and education.

St. Mary's health care centre provides telemedicine services in the most efficient way as compared to other companies. It provides telemedicine programs for pediatric patients, programs for children with high chronic conditions refer to as pilot programs. This organization has been identified as the leading provider for such services in New York, remote patients, and the population identified as at high risk can benefit from this program. As per the successful outcomes of the telehealth programs in adult programs, this organization has confidence that telemedicine is the major intervention in the healthcare sector to respond to some of the medical complexity. This program refines on how patients can receive medical care, where and measures required to run medication interventions with meaningful and clinical based information that is collected from the patent's home (Kahn, 2015).

Target Market

St. Mary's main target is the population with high-risk conditions and children. This enables children and their families to remain at home while accessing medical services. This organization uses telehealth programs to reach people who are referred to as medically complex population and vulnerable population. Most of these target population. This program brings doctors close to the patients hence making a difference in the treatment of patients, especially where specialist for the complex disease is insufficient.

The market segmentation is based on the patient's insurance status, geographic, and demographic segmentation. This organization uses this market segmentation to prioritize their target clients. The company has its market segmented into groups, it does target the individual customer, and therefore, it improves efficiency and increases the amount of income resulting from the number of the customers served. The customers are grouped according to their medical specifications cost-effectively. Segmentation is also based on medical conditions that are those patients at high risk and children; this plays an important role in promoting the name of the organization and providing a potential market for the clients.

Competitive Analysis

St. Mary's is one of the best healthcare organization with digital resources, this hospital is honoured as the best healthcare system based on content, creativity, quality of service, design, and success in reaching the target market. Despite the achievements and the market situation, St. Mary's medical centre faces stiff competition from other healthcare organization, these include:

• Covenant health
• Baptist Health System

University Health System

The three hospitals pose considerate competitive opportunities in the market based on their marketing techniques; they all provide acute care medical services for different conditions. Covenant health care system operates more than one acute care hospitals and other medical care facilities such as cancer centres, behavioural health centres, breast centres, and rehabilitation centres. The Baptist health system is another private institution offering acute care services in different hospitals. It operates on six popular health centres providing medical care for the older population. University health system is also another competitor; it is a private institution offering acute care hospitals. These competitors are profit organizations; their strategies and objectives are based on securing more share in the market in order to expand their services. Market strengths which these companies hold include an unlimited number of staffs, customer-based advertisements, and financial resources. These factors have encouraged optional performance for these organizations. Business their business opportunities are widely available since they provide extended medical services dealing with many diseases (Khan, 2014). This factor poses threats to to the development of this organization.

On the other hand, St. Mary's medical centre has advanced in expanding its market by developing collaboration with other health centres and the opening other institutions offering the same medical services. This organization has collaborated with other medical facilities to provide advanced healthcare services through telehealth. As a result of the high number of hospitals operating on acute care services, St. Mary's medical care is facing stiff competition despite the application telemedicine.

Marketing Mix-Promotional Strategy

In order to ensure successful marketing strategy, the organization must address key massages in marketing methods influence and empower potential customers to make their healthcare decisions and choose to acquire services from St. Mary's medical centre. The massages necessary for this case must be designed to convince the target audience about the services to provide n with the hospital; they include the importance of using telehealth services. The massages must express the main idea, that is the implementation of telemedicine. Furthermore, the quality of services that the companies offer and how best they are over services provided by the competitors must be included to ensure that the target market understands the benefits telemedicine. Also, the massages must identify the cost benefits of the program (Gurupur et al. 2017).

The origination will utilize various marketing vehicles to deliver messages to the target audience. These includes:

Print vehicles- this will involve the use of newspapers and magazines

Digital vehicles- this is the most popular marketing vehicle; the organization will utilize google adds. Internet marketing is the most effective method to be implemented (Mirzaei, Carter & Schneider, 2018).

Word of mouth- this will involve the use of publicity strategies to meet the desired response from the customers.

Promotional mix- this is one of the most effective marketing mixes, this element will involve the use of personal selling and direct marketing

The objectives of the above mix of marketing elements are to ensure increased demand for services and products, present the organization to consumers and to differentiate our services (telehealth) from those that are offed by our competitors.

Marketing Mix Place

Telemedicine will be offered to target a market that is a true population that requires acute care. Discharged patients will be monitored through telehealth to ensure an effective process of recovery. The major target market is to provide telemedicine services for rural areas to improve the quality of healthcare services and reduce the cost of medication. The hospital will schedule a time for calls based on the clinical requirements of the patients. This service is expected to in...