Medismarts, a health tech company, has launched a telemedicine platform service to ensure health insurance companies, hospitals and specialists seamlessly provide access to care for patients through its technology platform.
Findings by BusinessDay showed Medismarts built its automated technology platform to make integration into existing systems of healthcare providers possible.
The above development was achieved through the firm’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and software solutions, which make it possible to confirm eligibility instantly, grant authorisation for services at hospitals and facilitate electronic claims submission and payments.
“A number of players introduced their products to the market but we quickly found that it needed to be more or less tied to that particular provider. This we found to be a gap because if you were a healthcare provider and already had your doctors, medical professionals or healthcare professionals you were boxed into using a third-party provider’s solution with their own doctors on with their platform and based on rules outside your control,” Obinna Osuji, Co-founder and CEO, Medismarts Limited said.
In order to fit into the schedule of doctors, the company says its platform makes it possible to schedule appointments just like regular appointment visits. A patient gets a notification once the appointment is booked and the doctor also gets a notification and has their calendar blocked for the scheduled time.
Once it is 15 minutes to the appointment time, an email goes out to both the doctor and the patients reminding them of the upcoming appointments and also puts a link to join the session from within the body of the email. Once it’s time, the patient and the doctor can click on the link to start the session.
“Our telemedicine solution is essentially designed with flexibility in mind. A healthcare provider reaches out to us in need of a telemedicine solution. We simply find out from them if they have an existing electronic medical records (EMR) software which they would like to plug the telemedicine solution into.
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“If they do, we may charge a token to integrate our platform with this software and this immediately makes synergy possible between the two applications. The list of the doctors and their calendars are made available to the telemedicine platform via this integration and making it an extension of the existing platform,” Osuji said.
The company says another need for the platform is the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the access to healthcare. Hence, it deployed technology as a leverage to be able to deliver healthcare services. A lot of solutions came up during this time and this began to make healthcare accessible via telemedicine.
According to Medismarts, its platform is very similar to what most people are used to with some of the teleconferencing platforms out there in the market today including Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
This makes it easy to understand the process because both patients and doctors do not need any learning curves in order to use the platform. It is the equivalent of booking a meeting on your calendar and getting a link to join the meeting via email when it’s time.
“Our aim is to achieve the simplest possible workflow so that the handshake is natural,” Osuji said.
